Building my Facebook Messenger Bot
Here you can see some screenshots of me building up my Facebook Messenger bot.
I’ve first created a Facebook Business Page, and turned “on” the messaging function within it (inside the “Settings” tab on the top right of your Facebook Business page).
Learn about setting up a Facebook Business page here: https://www.facebook.com/business/learn/set-up-facebook-page
Here is what it looks like within my Facebook administrator interface:
Once the ability to receive Messages is turned on for your Facebook Business page, I find you can link directly to the Messenger interface using your business page ID like so
https://www.messenger.com /t/0123456789012345
(remove all the spaces), where that long number is the actual unique identifier, or “Facebook Page ID”, of your business page (find the “About” tab of your Facebook Page, and scroll to the very bottom).
Alternatively, grab a link from the Facebook Business Page itself, under Message | Copy Messenger Link
I’ve just embedded some HTML code in my site-in-development in order to link to Facebook Messenger — it’s just a button (the SMS button sends a text to my MeBot, which you can read about separately).
In this case I am using Chatfuel which is an extraordinary piece of software that’ll help you build out your bot in sections with minimal to no coding.
You’ll want to think about what you want your “menus” to link to, for example, I have mine link both externally, i.e. to my website, and my MailChimp signup form, as well as internally within Messenger.
In the case of Chatfuel, you set up very simple “content blocks”: I’ve set up 1) a “Gallery” of cards
2) an integration using IFTTT to my Instagram account, and
3) some additional text blocks with simple responses for background information, such as “Check out PosDiff.com” and “About Monica”.
Each interaction you specify within the Chatfuel interface may have a few menu items, where you’ve already identified where you want that link to go (either a content block or a different URL).
Here you’ll see the five gallery items that show up when I’ve specified the gallery to be displayed (notice the matching items in the “2.gallery” section in the Chatfuel interface above).
I’ve added a generic section to “Learn about Monica” which then shows three additional links to my website, blog, and my consulting Facebook Business Page. I haven’t yet found out how to do more than three buttons within Chatfuel, but three is enough.
Those additional buttons below can be pre-selected within Chatfuel, and then made to go to different links → from the user’s perspective they can then click on a particular choice.
Using the integration, I’ve added an option to show the latest Instagram pic from my feed, and I’ve added that “Latest pic” option as a choice within the menus.
Perhaps you’d want to do a link to YouTube, or Amazon, or Venmo, or some other such fun thing.
In general I found the interface to be straightforward and the thinking behind the chatbot to be very good for business pages or interactions that need a minimum of guidance.
There is some conversational UI that Chatfuel offers, where you can specify what the response would be, based on specific inputs. Also, you can gather inputs from the user such as their name and email, and forward them to another integration or email of your choice.
For me, I think this is a great extension from my existing SMS-based mebot, that uses Dexter and Twilio.
The possibilities of integrating these different tools are endless, but with step by step I think a start is putting the initial pieces together to get to know more about the organization or project, with an invitation to learn more.
Do you want to try out my Messenger bot? Please do at: https://m.me/1021591304621593
