Facebook just announced that after 15th of January, 2020 they’re going to close their 24 hours window policy and chatbots can’t send messages to users… or can they?
Everybody felt after the F8 conference that the number of Messenger chatbots reached a critial mass. It’s clear for everybody that they don’t want this platform to become a Facebook chatbot spam field – and of course they still wish to monetise them. The solution: sponsored messages, but let us tell more about this.
As they’ve said several times:
„Messenger Platform’s policies are designed to help people and businesses connect in ways that drive meaningful outcomes. At the heart of this is the understanding that people and businesses need a seamless, reliable way to get something done – whether it is getting a question answered, making a purchase, or communicating important and relevant updates.”
We can sum it up easily:
From January if a customer wants to contact the business: no change. Chatbots are still free. It’ll be just like as it’s now.
However, it will be different if the business wants to contact customers. First those companies, that have money for sponsored messages, can spam Messenger inboxes. We’re unsatisfied with this, because in our opinion these changes won’t bring the expected result: user protection from unwanted spams and sponsored messages.
On the other hand, we welcome these changes because Facebook now forces chatbot providers to create chatbots with real business value. Since 2016 when Talk-A-Bot was founded, we developed around 35 functions for Messenger as well as Viber, Line, Telegram and Microsoft Teams. With these app-like features we are still competitive on the chatbot market.
Sending marketing content to the users via chatbots
Surely it became more difficult and costly, but do not forget what Facebook messaged to businesses:
“We will continue to invest in more and better ways to help businesses connect with their customers wherever they are, including updates to m.me links, various entry points across our family of apps, as well as ad products that lead to Messenger.”
Talk-A-Bot still believes in the power of the Facebook Messenger platform as it’s still one of the best channels for digital business-to-consumer interaction. Talk-A-Bot’s unique, multilingual bots natively support 100+ languages using sophisticated language understanding in a secure way. Our content communication know-how helps our clients to achieve at least 85%-95% response accuracy rate with their chatbots. These capabilities combined with Messenger’s user reach really helps to automate and monetize business to human communication.
For sure, more changes are expected regarding Facebook Messenger. Security and privacy is still a major concern, so we’re looking forward the backend Integration of Messenger, Whatsapp and Instagram Direct that could be the largest global chatbot platform ever.
