Facebook has become an integral element of each and everyone’s life. Lately, the Californian tech-giant has started it’s attempts to make money out of it. It recently tested a self-serve sponsored messaging tool for small businesses incapable of building bots.
There were reports back in November prototype of the Messenger Broadcast tool that lets companies blast a message to anyone who has already started a conversation with them. Facebook is starting to test the Messenger Broadcast Composer externally. This is accessible to only a small percentage of Pages in the U.S., Mexico and Thailand.
For the time being, it’s a free service but for sure this is going to be a paid one.
Messenger is limiting the number of messages businesses can broadcast to check spam. They’re not allowed to ping anyone who hasn’t voluntarily talked to them first. Yet this is quite a controversial issue among some users, especially if business-persons try to blast out poor-quality promotions.
Businesses have to choose a subset of people who’ve messaged them to hit with a text blast. They specify title and body text, add an image and select a call to action, like a button to visit their website or a choice of pre-written replies.Businesses then separate their potential recipients by manual-labelling of conversations with tags like “interested in shoes” and then send the message to all threads with that label.
Facebook seems to be striving to help the small businesses. But, there’s another glitch. Feedbacks show that these small business owners still lack the technical knowledge to set up the Messenger platform (bot) to reach entire audience.
Facebook is also trying to rectify the problems it had in their previous versions. This feature can help growth of Facebook’s news feed adds, growth of the small businesses and at the same time make money for the company. But, Facebook must integrate this feature clearly lest its chat app becomes our new spam folder.