Facebook has now become such a common household name that many people get all their news from it. You can find instant weather updates, news reports, obituaries, school announcement and so much more. In fact, thanks to Facebook messenger, many people have the news in hand, around the clock, right in their very hands.
A California tech company as recently started towards the idea to make even more money from this factual commodity. It started recent testing on a sponsored tool for messaging, strategically aimed at small businesses that are otherwise unable to build bots.
In November 2017, we saw reports of a prototype of what was called a Messenger Broadcast tool. It would allow companies to flash messages to anyone who had ever started a conversation with the business. Facebook is now beginning to test this feature, Messenger Broadcast Composer, in external situations. It is currently only accessible to a very small number of Pages that are based in the United States, Thailand and Mexico.
At the moment, the service is free. However, if things pan out in such a way as to show that it will be readily accepted by the majority of users, it will definitely wind up being a paid service.
Additionally, Facebook Messenger has set a limit for the number of messages that any one business can broadcast. This effort is, in part, to keep spam in check and at a minimum. Businesses are also not allowed to ping anyone who hasn’t started the conversation with the business. Still, it’s a touchy subject for many users, including those who thing business personas will begin to send out low quality promotions that are, in essence, of no overall value.
In order to send this text blast, businesses must first choose a specific group of people from whom they have received messages to send their broadcast to. They then input a title and text for the body, followed by the option add images and a CTA. This can come in the form of a button or prewritten response. The business can then separate recipients with manual conversation labels like “interested in X product”, then mass-send the message to all marked with that particular label.
It looks like Facebook is making strides to help those in small business. However, there are existing glitches such as the owners of these small businesses lacking the tech knowledge to set up certain platforms.
