Facebook Messenger: The New Big Player In Digital Marketing?

If you think your business or brand has exhausted all Facebook’s features in terms of marketing, think again. Facebook has proven it’s not going anywhere.

The latest Facebook offering to the digital marketing world is now their popular Facebook Messenger tool.

Of course, the app is not new, and most of us probably have it on our phone. In fact, the Messenger app sees about 1.3 billion users monthly. But this year has seen new potential for the app to be used by brands and businesses. In 2017:

• 7 billion conversations took place on Facebook Messenger every day
• 17 billion real-time video chats on Messenger (double what they were in 2016)
• 18 billion GIFs shared
• 11 billion reactions shared since the feature launched in June

The numbers prove that a great market already exists on the Messenger app. Conversations also soar during holidays. This is important for businesses as a key element of social media marketing success can be to jump on the trending topics and join current conversations. The most active day for Messenger chats this year included New Year’s Day, Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day.

So, there is a definite potential for Facebook Messenger to be used as a marketing vehicle.

What Facebook is looking at now, is allowing businesses to send out mass messages via Facebook Messenger. Essentially, brands can use Facebook to broadcast their messages to their customers. Facebook is the perfect tool for this. Considering the amount of data Facebook has, businesses can easily reach target demographics. Mass messaging is not an official feature yet, but the company is conducting internal testing to see if it would be a good tool to implement.

Another opportunity for brands has been to market through Messenger chatbots. Chatbots were introduced to Messenger about a year ago, though since then, the trend has admittedly slowed. It seemed that not a lot of people knew about or used chatbots; and there was not enough feedback to improve on how the bots worked.

But this lack of awareness might just be what brands and marketers need!

Customers don’t know what chatbots are and hence have no expectation of what they’re supposed to be or do. So companies have a chance to look at what did and didn’t worked with existing chatbots and build up from there.

Chatbots can help businesses with CRM. Users can communicate with the bots about things like tracking orders, and new products, services, and features, serving as an intermediary between brands and their customers.

While marketing options for Messenger are still being developed, we can definitely see the potential benefits of using it as a marketing tool.

*** sources:

http://www.adweek.com/digital/facebook-messenger-broadcast-test/

http://www.adweek.com/digital/facebook-messenger-year-in-review-2017/

https://marketingland.com/inside-chatbots-year-growing-pains-210182