With over 3 billion active users each month, Facebook is used by more than a third of the world.
Businesses are turning to social commerce in droves – and everyone is on Facebook.
Facebook Messenger has become prime deployment grounds for all kinds of chatbots, including customer service chatbots, lead generation chatbots, and chatbots for hotels or real estate.
If you’re interested in building a chatbot for Facebook Messenger, you’ll want to find a chatbot platform that allows you to integrate to Facebook, sync up your website or other data, and personalize your messages so they’re on-brand for your customers.
In this article, we’ll take you through how you can use a chatbot for Facebook, the 7 best platforms for making your Messenger bot and, most importantly, how to build a good one.
Why use a chatbot for Facebook Messenger?
Facebook chatbots are available 24/7. They’re multilingual. They’re always on brand, and they provide accurate, personalized information to your customers.
That’s why more and more businesses are turning to a chatbot solution. Even a free chatbot offers personalized support and personalized recommendations, across your communication channels.
When customers can communicate with businesses directly on Messenger, it reduces the friction it takes to engage with your website, customer support, or sales funnel. They often have a better user experience when they can message with a company on a platform they’re already using.
What is a chatbot and what can it do?
A chatbot is a software application designed to interact with users. It can exchange messages, images, videos, and GIFs, as well as refer them to other sources.
For example, when interacting with a customer looking for help returning an item, a chatbot might send a link to your Return Policies webpage. Or if a customer doesn’t understand how to turn on their new gadget, your chatbot can link them to a Youtube video that you preemptively filmed and titled, ‘How to Set Up Your New Gadget in 3 Easy Steps.”
But chatbots can do more than chat.
These days, you can connect your chatbot to other platforms to make it work for you. Here are a few of the most effective ways to harness Facebook Messenger chatbots:
Sales
Even though they’re automated, that doesn’t mean a chatbot can’t directly boost your bottom line. They can support you at every step of the sales funnel.
A Facebook Messenger chatbot can help you with sourcing leads and lead qualification – since they’re able to conduct Facebook campaigns and engage in back-and-forth conversation, they’re perfectly capable of deciding who to qualify for your pipeline. If you’re interested in using a chatbot for lead qualification, you can read our piece on Using AI Agents for Lead Generation.
But a Facebook chatbot can also see the whole purchasing journey through to its end.
You can connect it to a payment processing service like Stripe, allowing your Facebook chatbots to accept payments and facilitate online purchases.
Analytics
If you use a Facebook chatbot builder with analytics tools, you can receive detailed statistics about your bot and your users.
Analytics tools can tell you what products or problems your users search the most, or customer expectations people have of your storefront.
If you want to improve your user experience, tracking wins and what can be improved is the number one way to do it. Your business can track these analytics directly from your chatbot.
Customer Support
The most obvious use for your Facebook Messenger chatbot is better customer service.
There are some clear benefits to using a Facebook bot: they offer 24/7 service, they’re often multilingual, and they never have a bad day. You can set the tone – or the exact wording – that you want your bot to use, and it will never stray off-brand.
While the bad chatbots of yesteryear get a bad rap for being unhelpful, the latest chatbot technology allows for a better user experience than your customers would experience otherwise.
They can receive personalized responses and rich messages that would be lost on an FAQ page. And they bring customer support directly to your customer – no more customers churning when they don’t know how to solve their problem and aren’t motivated to look for a solution.
And a Facebook chatbot doesn’t need to handle 100% of interactions. While a chatbot solution – when properly deployed – can handle many conversations from start to finish, some customer interactions need a real person. But you can configure your chatbot to connect to human agents when needed, to ensure no customers fall through the cracks.
The 7 best Facebook Messenger chatbot builders
There’s plenty of chatbot software choices on the market, from no-code drag-and-drop editors to extensible, open standard options for developers.
The best Facebook Messenger chatbot builder for you will depend on what you want your final bot to look like, and your building preferences.
Here are 7 of the best Facebook Messenger chatbot solutions. Almost all of them offer a free plan to get started, a connector to Facebook Messenger, and are powered by artificial intelligence.
1. Botpress
Botpress provides a drag-and-drop interface with built-in integrations, including Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram.
The Botpress Studio is a visual chatbot builder, but the software is fully extensible and boasts open standards, so developers can use it for businesses, too.
You can access advanced analytics for your Messenger bot on a customized dashboard, so that you can better measure the success of your customer experience.
Botpress also allows you to create a chatbot for Facebook Messenger for free, even offering millions of free AI tokens per month to all users.
2. Customers.ai
Customers.ai offers a Facebook Messenger bot builder tailored for marketers seeking to deliver chatbot services.
It has chatbot integration capabilities that allow it to work with a market ecosystem that includes advertising campaigns and drip marketing efforts.
It’s beginner-friendly, and it allows users to track user interactions with their chatbots. These kinds of performance metrics can help you track your bot’s performance over time.
All in all, Customers.ai allows you to engage users with personalized messages, automate your FAQ page, and schedule follow-ups with potential customers.
3. TARS
TARS presents a drag-and-drop chatbot builder that allows users to craft website chatbots with no coding experience. They allow users to build bot chatbots and conversational landing pages.
You can integrate your bot with integrations to apps like Slack and Messenger, making it easy to connect your bot wherever your users are.
4. Flow XO
Flow XO is a user-friendly platform that offers bot creation, hosting, and deployment across multiple platforms, like Messenger and Slack.
Its interface can be used to build chatbot widgets and integrate with compatible third-party platforms, like your website. Like the other options listed here, you don’t need extensive coding knowledge to deploy one of their bots.
5. Botsify
Botsify has a straightforward, clean user interface for crafting chatbots, designed for non-technical users.
If you’re an international organization or looking to scale, they offer multilingual support, so you can easily deploy your bots in multiple countries.
They also allow for integrations with third party platforms, so you can easily connect to Facebook Messenger after building your chatbot.
They provide analytics for your bot, so you can see how it performs, as well as understand your customers better.
6. Pandorabots
Pandorabots is a powerful platform for those looking to build highly customized chatbots.
However, it does come with a prerequisite: you’ll need some decent coding skills to make the most of its capabilities. While not beginner-friendly, it offers various options for experienced bot engineers.
With their open standards and bot-building community, Pandorabots is a good choice for those looking to deploy more advanced bots at a serious level of business.
They offer speech recognition, analytics, and documentation to help you build a bot that fits your company’s needs.
7. Chatfuel
Chatfuel is designed exclusively for Facebook Messenger, making marketing chatbots accessible to a wide audience. While this is good news for ease of integration, it does mean you might be limited if you want to expand to more channels.
While the platform offers a free version, it's important to note that the Chatfuel branding will be visible on your bot when using it.
But on the plus side, their user-friendly interface is a non-technical flow builder. Like other options on the list, they provide analytics on your Messenger bot performance, and you can shift from automated chat to live chat.
How to build the best Facebook Messenger bots
If you want to see returns on your Messenger chatbot, you should strive to make it the best one you can. Remember that no one likes talking to a bad bot.
Here are a few considerations to take your Facebook bot from an annoying interface to a chatbot that can create meaningful customer experiences:
Personalization
The best Facebook chatbot will have a degree of personalization. You can create chatbots that just answer basic questions, like a conversational FAQ page, but it’s not difficult to bring Messenger bots to the next level.
If you create your Facebook bots on a chatbot platform, you can personalize your customer experience:
- Your Facebook bots can address your customers by name
- Your bots can remember past sessions with a customer
- Your bots can personalize recommendations for customers based on previous sales
- Your bots can send messages with geographic specifications – like which retailers your products can be found at – based on your customers’ location
- Your bots can modify their tone – like whether they use GIFs – based on the age of your customer
When your Facebook Messenger chatbots deliver personalized messages, it improves the overall reputation of your business.
Synced to your information
If someone wanted to use ChatGPT, they would. They’re using your Facebook chatbot because they want accurate information about your business.
Your Facebook Messenger bots should be synced with your internal information, like your products and their availability, your website, your return policies, or another source of truth.
Standard chatbot platforms will offer pre-built integrations that allow you to connect to other sources of information, like a table or a website. Once they’re in sync, your Facebook Messenger chatbots will be able to provide accurate information for your customers.
Deploy a Facebook chatbot tomorrow
Botpress is an open standards chatbot platform, with built-in connectors to Facebook Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Telegram.
Our drag-and-drop visual builder allows you to quickly assemble a next-generation chatbot to deploy across your social media channels.
And with an advanced analytics dashboard and millions of free tokens per month, you can deploy a measurably successful chatbot at no cost.
Start building today. It’s free.
Or you can contact our sales team.
FAQ
How many messages can Facebook bots send?
The number of messages that your Facebook bots can send depends on your budget for AI cost. Each time you ask an LLM a question, you incur a very small fee. But some chatbot platforms will offer free AI spend to their users.
Are Messenger chatbots expensive to set up?
You can set up Messenger chatbots for Facebook for free. Every chatbot platform will have different pricing plans, but most offer a free tier.
How can I connect my chatbot to Facebook?
Your chatbot platform should offer an integration to Facebook, so that you can use your chatbot on your Facebook page or as a Facebook bot on Messenger.
Who can access my Facebook Messenger bot?
Once you deploy Facebook Messenger chatbots, anyone who can access your Facebook page can interact with your Messenger bots. If needed, you can configure your bot to only interact with certain users (e.g. if they have a .edu email, or if they’ve visited your page before).
Does Facebook Messenger offer Messenger bots?
Facebook does not directly offer chatbots, but it’s easy to create a chatbot and then connect it to your business’ Facebook account using a pre-built integration.
How do I build a conversation flow in my Facebook Messenger bot?
You can create specific conversation flows in a chatbot studio – most of the ones we list here have a drag and drop interface. Depending on your customer’s question or problem, the chatbot will offer different conversational flows.
What can Facebook Messenger chatbots do?
Facebook Messenger chatbots can chat with customers, conduct sales, message leads, and showcase your products or solutions. You can also sync them with your internal systems so that they can book meetings, update documents, or stock your sales funnel on your CRM.
Can Facebook chatbots connect to a human agent?
Yes, Facebook chatbots can connect to real people if a conversation needs to escalate. While a chatbot can handle most customer questions, connecting to a live agent will increase the reliability of your customer service.
What other platforms can I connect my Facebook chatbots to?
You can connect your Facebook chatbots to different channels, like Instagram, WhatsApp, and Telegram. You can also connect them to CRMs like Salesforce and Hubspot.
Can I use Facebook for chatbot conversations?
Yes, you can use Facebook to host AI conversations with your users. Businesses often use Facebook Messenger bots for lead generation, sales, customer support, and more.
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