The Most Complete Report On What Facebook Messenger Has Launched On F8
An in-depth report on the growth and development of the popular platform.
This week is special for bot makers. Yesterday Facebook announced Messenger Platform 2.0 on F8 and I’m going to share the story behind it and highlight all the biggest updates in this post, because this platform has changed a lot.
Platform Has Grown By 20%
Now there are 1.2 BLN users on Messenger. They send 2 BLN messages a month to businesses. That’s insane.
Messenger Platform was launched last year. And it was really BETA. A lot of hype, a lot of scepticism. But since then Messenger team worked hard to continuously improve the experience. And they did a great job! Have a look at the path we went through:
- April 2016: Messenger Platform Opens
- June 2016: Menus & Quick Replies
- September 2016: Webviews & Payments
- November 2016: Entry Points & Templates
- February 2017: Persistent Menu & Sharing
And guess what?…
It’s Working!
Businesses & brands are finding success on the platform. Despite all the scepticism, now we have working use cases with big brands.
They have used bots for several purposes and succeeded:
- Raising Awareness (Activision, Tommy Hilfiger)
- Acquiring Customers (Meetic, Sephora)
- Providing Better Customer Service (KLM, Globe, Rogers, Hyatt)
- Enabling Commerce & Transactions (Absolut, Subway, eBay, SnapTravel)
- Financial Services (American Express, PayPal, MoneyGram, Western Union, Wells Fargo, MasterCard)
“If you direct customers to your Messenger bot instead of your website or app you’ll a see a lift if you built the right experience” — David Marcus
IMPORTANT: A Few Insights From Best Use Cases
- Meetic has built a dating bot that conversion rates are a 30% higher than all of the other channels.
- Rogers, the largest mobile operator in Canada, has seen a customer satisfaction lift of over 60% by providing service on Messenger.
- Globe in the Philippines has increased employee productivity by 3.5 times by adding automation via Messenger.
“Financial services on Messenger are truly starting to find product-market fit” — David Marcus
From Amex experience to Paypal, which in the last couple of months connected over a million accounts with Messenger. And many more are coming this week.
Ecosystem Has Grown A Lot
2 BLN messages a month is a lot. To make this happen, the community around bots & Messenger had to grow super fast. And now..
We have over a 100.000 unique bots built by now, and 100.000 bot developers. Could you imagine?!
That’s crazy. It’s a new big ecosystem and I’m so excited to share these updates with you to help you build better bots.
“Last year was a year of learning a lot, iterating, and trying new things. This year is a year of scale.” — David Marcus
Discovery Is Finally Here
Now bots are good enough to be discovered! Facebook has finally released a whole new part of Messenger, where you could find the best bots, places and businesses. Here’s how it looks:
It also includes categories such as Entertainment, News, Food & Drink and many more. All you have to do to get your bot featured in discovery is to complete Facebook’s Discover submission form, takes few mins.
>> Have a look at the demo video here
Brand New Messenger Codes — Now People Could Scan Them In A Sec!
Messenger Codes is a great tool to drive people to your bot from offline, but last time it was located deep in Messenger app, and it was tough to create one so nobody used it.
Now you could generate multiple parametric codes to activate different bot functionalities. And they could be scanned from native Messenger camera!
One bot, multiple code, multiple experiences. You can even A/B test them to see which people use the most! How crazy is that?!
>> Learn more about Parametric Codes here
Chat Extensions Are Here To Win Group Chats
Now experiences with bots on Messenger are mainly single-player and one-on-one. With Chat Extensions you can add bots and services like Spotify to group & single chats to do some stuff!
It might be restaurant reservations, food ordering, splitting payments, entertainment and many many more. TriviaBlast, Swelly and many more already offer these experiences. And Apple Music will be on the platform very soon as well.
>> Have a look at the demo video here
Smart Replies For Small Business Owners
Messenger wants to bring automation to SMBs, because they have no time to answer dozens of questions and money for customer support team.
So they launched Smart Replies powered by AI for restaurant in the US. Now they could automate responses to the messages they get on Messenger.
Smart Replies engine grabs the information from business page, automatically detects the types of questions that are being asked and response on business’ behalf!
Featured CBM: 2017 Will be the Year of the Killer Bots
M Suggestions For Everyone
Facebook launched M Suggestions a few weeks ago, and it already can recommend some things like making plans, setting reminders, setting or receiving money, or sharing your location.
Most importantly, it can recommend funny stickers to share too! ❤️
But I’m sure you understand where it goes. If it could understand context, then the next thing to come is to suggest right bots from chat extensions to use for this particular task!
“As M gets smarter, it will start making recommendations for Chat Extensions built by developers!” — David Marcus
This is going to take some time, be patient. But just imagine this new discovery mechanics:
You could be discovered right in the middle of use case you built your product for!
Messenger starts to roll this out from partnership with delivery.com, trying to detect what is the right time to order food in group conversation, and make an order right in Messenger via a webview. And pay for it using native payments. Do you feel the ecosystem?
Next Level Of Games On Messenger
Since last year 1.5 BLN games has been played.
This time Facebook introduced 2 key things:
- Rich gameplay, that will enable real-time gaming and turn-by-turn games.
- New Games tab in Messenger, right near the Discovery for bots. There you can find all of the games you’re playing and challenges for your friends.
With massively improved discovery, chat extensions, better AI, and more engaging games, you have everything you need to take the Messenger experience to the next level with your products.
IMPORTANT: Cool Secret Features That Were Released Quietly
Despite the main event, Facebook released some new extremely important features on Messenger, that hasn’t been shown at F8. I’ll go through them too to make everything 100% clear:
Hand-Over Protocol. Multiple Bots For One Business? Not A Problem!
Now businesses can work with multiple developers to create different experiences within a single bot.
Messenger team says: “With this hand-over protocol tool on our platform, various vendors and developers will be able to pass control back and forth based on the state of the conversation.”.
So if you want to offer several services, for example, personal shopping and customer support, everything can work in one bot! Note: currently available for limited business, in testing.
New ID Matching API
Today there’re two different IDs for bots in Messenger and Apps. So if you have an existing customer in Facebook and want to personalize your communication with them in Messenger, this API pairs the two IDs between an app and a bot in Messenger belonging to the same business.
Open Graph Template
This feature lets bots send open graph content directly to threads. Currently supports only music URLs natively with inline playback.
Platform Design Kit
If you ever wondered how to design your bot to show the prototype to other people, you already tried to look for templates. And there’s a good one, but it only supports Messenger Platform v1.1.
Now Facebook released the Platform Design Kit, a library of components for designing bots. It’s a nicely organized Sketch file where you can find all bot components you may need to design a great bot.
Referral Info From Messenger Ads
Users can now access referral information when users enter via a Messenger Ads. Good one!
More CTAs On Facebook Pages
On Facebook pages that have bots, the owner can now make primary CTAs like “Get Support” or “Shop Now” open the bot (in addition to “Message Us”).
Watch A Full Facebook Messenger F8 Keynote:
One Last Important Call To Every Bot Developer
This is an advice from Phil Libin @ General Catalyst that I’d like to share with you guys as a last point. Last, but very-very important.
“Don’t think of yourself as a bot developer. Don’t pitch the whole yourself like that. Think of yourself as making a great product and a product that was impossible to make even 2 or 3 years ago because the technology stack didn’t exist. So what can you do now, it’s a little bit magic that you couldn’t do before. And now is the best time to go and build those things, because the tools and capabilities exist.”
Get ALL USEFUL INFORMATION about bots in one free awesome repo on Github!
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