Facebook Messenger is one communication tool that has taken off over the last few years. It lets you interact with potential customer who visit your Facebook business page and easily keep in contact with them through the Messenger app.
People are now very accustomed to chatting on Facebook and other social networks. This makes them more likely to send you a quick message than an email or filling in a contact form. This reason alone makes it a very useful tool for both sales and customer service of your business.
Up until now the only way people could start interacting with you through messenger was from your Facebook page. That has all changed and now you can have Messenger directly embedded on your website so visitors can chat to you about product or services without leaving your website. Even if you can’t reply straight away, because of the fact that the messages are stored directly in Messenger you can reply later, meaning they don’t actually need to stay on your website for you to start a conversation with them.
How To Add Facebook Messenger To Your Website
Facebook have made adding Messenger to your website relatively easy, and here is how you do it:
- Go to the settings of your Facebook business page
- Look for the “Messenger Platform” tab in the left hand menu and click on it
- Scroll down to “Customer Chat Plugin” and click the setup button
- The first page will allow you to customise the greeting message people see when the chat plugin loads.
- The next page allows you to set a custom response time message as well as custom colours which you can setup to match your own business branding.
- Finally you just need to enter the domain name you want the chat plugin to appear and it will give you a piece of code which you will need to copy and past into your website just after opening the <body> tag. If your using WordPress there may be an option in your theme settings to add custom code or you can add it directly to your template files through the theme editor. If you’re not sure ask your web designer/developer who will be able to help you.
- Once you have added the code, the chat plugin will appear on your website and allow you to connect with your visitors through Messenger without leaving your website, which means happy days!
Before finishing we should really address the elephant in the room, and that is that this chat plugin is only going to work with people who have a Facebook account. So if a visitor is not on Facebook then the plugin becomes redundant and could actually negatively affect the user experience. So this is something you will need to address by looking are you own target audience and of those the percentage that are likely to be on Facebook.
