Years after Mark Zuckerberg announced the creation of Facebook Messenger bots, many Facebook users and businesses still do not understand how useful Messenger bots can be. There are only around 500,000 Facebook Messenger bots used actively today.
With so many of you who are yet to discover the usefulness of Facebook Messenger bots, here is a simple introduction and guide on how to set up and use Facebook Messenger bots.
What Is a Facebook Messenger Bot?
A Facebook Messenger bot is a piece of software designed to use AI (artificial intelligence) in order to communicate with others. In simplest terms, a bot is an automated software designed to perform automated tasks.
These bots understand what they are being asked and are able to formulate a human-like response. This is why Facebook bots are on a good path to completely revolutionize the face of marketing, customer service, and sales. Automation is the way of the future.
How to Set Up Facebook Messenger Bots
There are a couple of ways you can set up Facebook Messenger bots, depending on how comfortable you are with coding. For those who do not know how to code, here is a simple way to set up bots without coding through Chatfuel.
Sign Up to Chatfuel
You can register to Chatfuel for free, or you can choose one of the three premium memberships that Chatfuel offers. You can easily create Facebook chatbots with the free membership, thus, you do not have to worry about monthly payments.
On the homepage of Chatfuel, click the Try For Free button to get started. You should then sign in to your Facebook account and allow Chatfuel to access your public profile and email.
You need to link your Facebook account to your Chatfuel account.
Customize Your Chat Bot
After registering and linking your account, you can start customizing your Messenger bot. The first thing you should set up is the welcome message that anyone who encounters your Messenger bot will be able to see.
You can do this by clicking Settings > Messaging on your Facebook page. Set Show a Messenger Greeting to Yes, click Change, and then enter your welcome message into the box. After that, simply click Save.
Sometimes, users could ask the Messenger bot something that the AI will not know how to answer. If this happens, you need to set up a default reply which will tell them what they need to do next (contact support, reward their question, etc).
Setting up some AI rules is also a must. You can do this by clicking on Set Up AI > Add AI Rule in the Chatfuel dashboard. Chatfuel allows you to set up as many keywords as you want.
Add a Message Button
The Messenger button will not magically appear on your Facebook page, keep that in mind.
If you want to add it to your Facebook page, you need to first open your Facebook page and click Add a Button. A window will pop up where you can select Contact You and Send Message. Select Messenger when asked where the button should send people.
2 Other Ways You Can Set Up Facebook Chat Bots
1. Dialogflow
Dialogflow (free) is a service owned by Google. It is a natural language understanding platform that allows you to design and integrate a conversational interface into web applications, mobile apps, bots, interactive voice response systems, devices, and related uses.
Pros:
- Easy NLP (Natural Language Processing) integration.
- It contains many pre-built agents.
- You can connect to platforms other than Facebook, such as Twitter, Telegram, Slack, and more.
- It recognizes over 15 languages.
- It’s free.
Cons:
- It’s not very customizable. Creating a customizable bot means that you need to implement a code flow.
- It’s not very implementable. It can be quite tricky to figure out how to implement it on different platforms.
2. Wit.ai
Owned by Facebook, Wit.ai (free) works quite similarly to Dialogflow. It processes human speech patterns and filters useful data. Wit.ai provides UI to help you create intents, agents, and entities.
Pros:
- It easily integrates NLP.
- It offers a quick-start tutorial that is quite practical.
- You can integrate it with platforms other than Facebook, such as Twitter, Slack, Telegram, and more.
- It’s completely free.
- It is adaptable as you can build your bot with Python, Node.js, or Ruby.
Cons:
- It is not that fast as there is a learning curve to Wit.ai.
- It is not that visual, meaning that there is no visual development, thus you need to be comfortable with code.
Easily Create Your Own Facebook Messenger Bot
You do not have to know coding in order to create a Facebook Messenger bot. Chatfuel is a platform that will do most of the work for you, but this is also not the only helper out there. If you’re a bit into coding, you have a couple of options from Google and Facebook to help you make customized chatbots.
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