Facebook messenger marketing is becoming a key mechanism to reach your audience using organic vs paid strategies. Here 7 social audience development strategies and platforms for you to try.
There are now more than 1.3 billion people using Facebook Messenger every month1. Yes, billion with a b!
Have you considered the possibility of using it for your marketing?
We certainly have. And we have been experimenting with different ways to include Messenger as one of our go-to marketing tools, by sending out our latest blog posts through Messenger and engaging and helping our customers through the platform too.
Since we are in the midst of figuring things out, we thought it would be great to share what we have found so far.
Here’s everything we know about using Facebook Messenger for your marketing.
Why use Facebook Messenger
We often think of social media as just the major social media networks such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. But that thinking misses a big part — a bigger part, in fact — of social media. And that’s messaging apps.
According to BI Intelligence, more people are using the top four messaging apps (WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, and Viber) every month than the top four social media apps (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn)2. And it seems that the gap between the two lines is getting bigger.
Instead of being a one-to-many channel, social media is becoming a one-to-few — and often one-to-one — channel.
Facebook IQ conducted a study on the use of mobile messaging with 12,500 people across the world and found several promising trends among the people surveyed3:
- Sixty-three percent said that their messaging with businesses has increased over the past two years
- Fifty-six percent would rather message than call a business for customer service
- Sixty-one percent likes personalized messages from businesses
- More than 50 percent are more likely to shop with a business they can message
- Here are a few more interesting statistics about messaging:
If you are starting to think that messaging might be great for your business, read on to find out the seven ways of using Facebook Messenger for your marketing.
7 ways to use Facebook Messenger for your marketing
1. Deliver your content
The most common approach to deliver content to your readers is to use email. But HubSpot wanted to find out if using Facebook Messenger is a better alternative. So instead of just asking people to fill out a form and get the gated content via email, they offered the option to skip the form and get the content via Facebook Messenger. After four weeks of testing, they found a clear winner4.
The Messenger strategy results in a 242 percent higher open rate and a 619 percent higher click rate5.
If you want to explore this strategy, Matthew Barby from HubSpot wrote a great guide on building a Messenger chatbot using ChatFuel. With ChatFuel, you can create a chatbot to deliver your content (and more) without having to code. And it’s free regardless of how many messages you send.
Here’s an example of how a chatbot newsletter opt-in looks 6:
(We are testing a Facebook Messenger chatbot to deliver our latest blog posts. It’s not perfect yet but if you are interested, you can find it here.)
2. Help your followers find the most relevant content
Besides pushing content to your followers, you can also use Facebook Messenger to help your followers “pull” content to themselves.
There are many great examples of this use case on Facebook Messenger. Companies like Whole Foods Market, Food Network, and TechCrunch have Messenger chatbots that can help their followers find articles that they want to read. For example, this is what it looks like when I try to find articles related to Elon Musk on TechCrunch, using their chatbot:
This turns things around for content marketing. You now have a non-intrusive way to deliver personalized content to your target audience. If you are considering this strategy, here are some best practices, according to Ana Gotter on the Social Media Examiner blog7:
– Treat your chatbot like content marketing. Selling shouldn’t be your primary objective, but you can use content to send users to your site.
– Ensure your site is mobile-responsive.
– Inform customers how and where to contact you if they need additional help, including customer service issues.
– Include browsing menus if possible. This makes it easier for users to find content they’re interested in, even if they don’t know exactly what they’re looking for yet.
Creating a chatbot that allows your followers to search is a little more complicated than creating a chatbot that simply delivers content. But great tools like MobileMonkey, ChatFuel, ManyChat, and Botsify have guides and templates to help you. If this strategy excites you, I would encourage you to have a go at these tools and see what you can do with them.
3. Engage participants during event
Another way HubSpot uses Facebook Messenger is to send important information and reminders about events that people have signed up to. Similar to the example above, they found that the response rate on Facebook Messenger was significantly higher than that on email8.
Here’s a recent experience I had with HubSpot:
- I signed up for their Four Days of Facebook event through Facebook Messenger (which felt much nicer than filling up a form).
- The day before the event, they sent me a reminder…
