Social Media platform, Facebook doesn’t want to leave any stone unturned towards its mission of minting money. The company today announced Facebook Messenger version 1.3, which will be making sponsored messages available to advertisers. In short, advertisers will be able to send you, the user, messages using the platform.
The news was announced by VP of product for Messenger, David Marcus, at the Web Summit conference in Lisbon.
Once this change is implemented, on clicking the advertisement of a product in your News Feed, instead of directly being redirected to the website of the brand, you can instead chose to stay within Facebook’s walled garden and continue the conversation through Messenger.
Needless to say, this gives advertisers a much more intimate way of accessing potential customers directly. Considering that Messenger has already crossed the 1 Billion mark, there is a huge opportunity there and advertisers probably won’t mind spending some bucks to generate leads and get new business.
This news comes just after Facebook decided to stop sharing data between its platform and its other big messaging platform, WhatsApp, at the request of the UK’s data protection watchdog, the ICO.
Here are a bunch of other updates that the new version of the Messenger has to offer for bots.
- Reference Params for M.me Referral Links: Developers can now add reference params to their m.me vanity link, allowing them to determine where their bot traffic is coming from.
- Deep Linking for M.me Referral Links: With the new reference param, developers can also deep link someone into a particular bot experience. For example, if someone clicks on the m.me link from a particular section within a website, a developer can now send a message that references that section.
- List Templates: Developers can now leverage new list templates, which showcase information in an easy-to-digest list. You can add a CTA or image to items in the list to customize the look and feel of the template.
- Pre-Checked Plugin: Developers can now add a checkbox plugin to easily allow customers to opt into a Messenger conversation with their business.
- Improvements to Search Results: We’re also releasing improvements to our bot search results, which will make it easier for people to find and discover bots.
In short, “More revenue” for the social networking platform.
