3 quick tips for brands to get the most out of Facebook Messenger

Facebook Messenger allows consumers to easily open a dialogue with the companies. Both Messenger and Facebook — as the social network — are becoming more integrally linked, and it is great news for brands.  The social networking platform recently announced a new set of tools that allow a more personalised experience between consumers and businesses.

With around one billion users chatting on Facebook Messenger each month, Facebook is taking the reach of its social platform and integrating customer service and engagement opportunities inherent to Messenger.

Related: Facebook Messenger now boasts 11 000 bots, announces incoming updates

There are three important aspects to this development for brands.

Secure your ‘handle

The first and foremost is to ensure you secure your ‘handle’ as soon as possible (if you haven’t already done so). Your handle (or vanity URL in Facebook lingo) is the name that comes directly after the ‘/’.

For example: facebook.com/companyname and the handle will show up as @company name underneath the page name.

Create memorable shortlinks and scanning codes

Beyond creating the more easily recognisable handles, Facebook is also creating highly memorable shortlinks (m.me/username) and scanning codes (á la Snapchat), so that users can have the lowest barrier to entry to chat with your brand.

What this means for you is people will only need to remember your company’s name or scan your code as opposed to searching to find your page and both can be used offline (think business cards, store signage, brochures, product packaging, and so forth).

Create customisable greetings

Lastly with the drive to send these conversations to Messenger, Facebook has allowed brand to create customizable Messenger greetings.

With these messages your company is able to set the tone or pass along important information to those who are reaching out to chat (not to be confused with canned messages/saved replies which Facebook introduced last year).