Facebook Messenger’s reach extends far and wide, and marketers staking out new social media territory could benefit by tapping into the platform’s power.
In September, Facebook advised more than 1.3 billion people around the world are using the service every month, amid the continued rollout of new features.
Buffer content crafter Alfred Lua explained in a blog post that Buffer has been experimenting with employing Facebook Messenger as a marketing tool, using it to send blog posts and to engage with and help customers.
Here are two of the ways Lua says Messenger can be harnessed to give your marketing efforts a boost.
For many businesses, email may be the most common method of distributing content, but what about using Messenger?
Lua cites a HubSpot experiment that sought to determine if Messenger could be a replacement for email communications.
Promoting a new content offer, HubSpot provided its readers two options: to submit a form and receive content immediately via email, or to be provided immediate access via Messenger, with approximately 20% choosing the latter option.
HubSpot then sent regular Messenger broadcasts to the users who had opted in, suppressing them from email sends.
The engagement metrics of the two channels after four weeks showed that Messenger broadcasts had an average open rate of 80% and an average click rate of 13%, which were respectively 242% and 619% better than the email controls.
Businesses should also consider using Facebook Messenger to help followers find they content they are searching for, which in turn could drive further engagement.
Lua points to examples of companies using Messenger chatbots to help followers find articles of interest, turning “things around for content marketing”, describing this as “a non-intrusive way to deliver personalised content to your target audience”.
“Creating a chatbot that allows your followers to search is a little more complicated than creating a chatbot that simply delivers content,” he writes.
“But tools like 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.”
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Martin Kovacs is a journalist with experience covering the IT, consumer electronics, retail, finance and energy sectors.
