The time when businesses could ignore social media or treat it purely as something with leisure but not commercial advantages is long gone. Companies and organisations of all shapes and sizes have now come to realise just how powerful a tool social media can be when it comes to marketing, customer interaction and even customer service.
Social media providers too, are wise to the advantages their services can offer to businesses and are increasingly tailoring their different offerings toward broader commercial use. A prime example of that comes in the form of Facebook Messenger and we are now going to explain why your business may wish to begin using the service and how Facebook have recently made it much easier for you to do so.
Why Choose to Use Facebook Messenger?
First and foremost, the major reason why your company might wish to consider utilising Facebook Messenger regards reach. Statistics have recently revealed that Facebook Messenger now has over 900 million active monthly users and that in total over 1 billion messages are already exchanged between businesses and customers each month.
What that means is that Facebook Messenger represents a way to communicate directly with a huge swathe of customers and potential customers, and that some businesses are already taking advantage of that even if you are not. What’s more, there is an increasingly large generation of individuals whose primary form of communication is via social media avenues such as Facebook Messenger.
It should be obvious therefore, that Facebook Messenger is a communication channel which your business cannot afford to ignore and fortunately Facebook have recently introduced a number of features to aid firms looking to use their service.
Facebook Messenger’s Business Friendly Features
In order to facilitate businesses which are beginning to utilise Facebook Messenger as an instantaneous and far-reaching channel of communication with their customers, Facebook have recently announced a suite of new features.
Those features are headlined by ‘Messenger Links’ and ‘Messenger Codes’, which both represent a quicker and easier way for customers and potential customers to enter into a chat with any business. ‘Messenger Links’ are short URLs utilising a business’s Facebook username that when clicked immediately opens a chat thread with the company, whilst ‘Messenger Codes’ are essentially QR codes which can be scanned to serve the same purpose.
The idea behind those features is that they can be used on company websites, in advertisements and as part of other marketing material and they feed perfectly into the instantaneous nature of communication via social media, which is largely what makes it so popular.
A final business-centric new feature of the Messenger service which Facebook have recently introduced regards what a customer or potential customer will see when they begin a chat with a company. Facebook have announce that a new ‘Messenger Greetings’ feature will soon allow companies to create a set note that will appear at the outset of any messenger thread and which will serve the purpose of setting the tone of the conversation or relaying important information to the customer.
Hopefully this post has given you plenty of ideas of how Facebook Messenger could benefit your company and if you want more advice about successful IT management of all kinds, then you need only get in touch with one of EC-MSP’s dedicated professionals.
