4 Steps to Getting Approved for Messenger
And some advice for providing a consistent bot experience.
First — make sure you review the official Facebook guidelines for the basics.
Now, I’m going to share advice about those basics from myself, and others who have made gotten bots approved. At the end, you’ll also see some quick tips about designing bot experiences so they are consistent and valuable to your users. Can’t hurt to have all of your bases covered before submitting!
Disclaimer: These are not just my own thoughts, opinions, or experience. This is a compilation of wise advice gathered from Matt Schlicht’s Facebook Bots group. Special thanks to Mikhail Larionov, Chee Yu Yang, and Fasih Khatib for their (referenced) contributions to the group.
What’s Your Platform?
A website. List yourself as a website.
Facebook gives your chatbot a link, and that makes you a website.
What Kind of Info Do I Need?
Facebook will ask you to provide additional info in the notes.
What they’re looking for here is a detailed list of what your chatbot use cases are. Keep in mind, these are not your typical ‘use cases’ — instead, these are just showing how your bot is using the Facebook Send/Receive API.
Let me explain.
Our bot, Where, provides people with quick recommendations for food, drinks, and fun. I might say our use case is gathering information to provide restaurant recommendations. But for this structure — we had three different use cases:
Although users may receive a recommendation based on different combinations of these, we list them out as separate calls based on the fact that we receive each entity separately. If a user sends a food type, we send it to be stored in our Natural-Language Processor. Then when the user sends us a location (pin or city), it will get combined with that food type to run a search and return recommendations.
This may not be a huge part of the approval process, but some people have had issues in the past with not putting enough detail in the notes — and that can be cause for resubmission. Might as well avoid it from the start!
(Thanks for the tip, Chee Yu Yang!)
What Will You Show in Your Video?
Facebook requires a screenshot of your bot. How much should you show?
To be entirely honest…
This is up to you. But for a speedy approval process? Probably best to just go through everything that is a primary use case for your bot. For Where, we showed a bit of a long walkthrough, but feel free to take a look at it here if you want: https://vimeo.com/167819254
We used Quicktime to record ours on an iPhone, but I’ve also heard that some people are using AZ Screen Recorder for Android, so that works great too!
As a general rule of thumb, though, I might say —
If your bot does a few very simple tasks — show off all of them in detail.
If your bot does a lot of things — make sure to go through them, but don’t worry about exaggerating every single scenario the way we did with Where.
If anyone else has had a different experience with the screencast process, please comment with your advice!
What in the #%&@ Is a Privacy Policy?
More importantly, what needs to be in it?
Well, I’m no lawyer. And the consensus on this is pretty varied.
Some people have privacy policies that are only a few sentences stating what data they are collecting and whether or not they are going to use it.
Others, have longer privacy policies. We used a Free Privacy Policy Generator for ours. It’s not the prettiest site, but it seems to get the job done and they email you an html doc in the end. You can also check out our revised privacy policy if you want.
Although, personally… I love Fasih Khatib’s advice:
Sounds solid, yeah? Haha!
But in all seriousness, don’t stress too much over this. I may not be a lawyer, but it doesn’t seem like anyone has had to hire one to get their privacy policy (and bot) approved by Facebook.
Lastly — Some Words On the Experience
Mikhail Larionov took the time to give the Bots group some advice, so I’m going to include it here.
These are some of the things that are wrong, and should be taken into consideration when designing your bot. Experience is key when distinguishing your bot from all of the rest. As a group, bot-builders are trying to establish some sort of consistency across our products. After all, UI guidelines exist for a reason — shouldn’t conversational guidelines exist too? As a community, those are still being defined. But these seem to be like a good place to start. Also check out The Bot Playbook for more on how to create a meaningful experience for the user.
There’s no guarantee that following these guidelines will help with the approval process directly, but it’s worth the read:
I was going through a lot of approved bots for Messenger Platform recently. There are several things that I wanted to highlight.
1) Onboarding. There’re two MUST HAVE features: greeting text and null-state CTA. Every good bot should have them. The message that you send on the button click should provide an explanation of what your bot does and give some clear options (ideally via buttons).
https://developers.facebook.com/…/messenger…/implementation…2) Value. Bots have very limited UI by nature. Trying to stuff a single bot with a lot of things doesn’t work well. A good bot focuses on a single utility function, clear value prop, and aligns all of the flows around this functionality.
3) Natural language. Bots should not pretend to be powered by AI, if they are not. Instead of resorting to text input, use the buttons. Use text input only when needing unstructured input (such as an address, search query, etc).
If your bot is doing all of that right, please share the link for others to check!
In general, think of bots as apps for which you need to have good onboarding, clear utility, some retention mechanisms (meaningful subscriptions), and potentially some virality (something people would want to share).
PS: attached image is purely to attract your attention.
PPS: please do not message me personally, let’s have a conversation in the comments. The purpose of this post is educational, let’s share
I’ll end the article here. If you have any other questions, please comment or reach out to myself or Nick Braver to learn about our experience submitting Where.
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