Twitter is now allowing brands to use its platform to promote their Chatbots. The company had been missing out on some of the chatbot action of late and with this, it appears to be coming back into the race. The company has announced a brand new feature wherein brands will be able to promote ads that ultimately get the customer engaged into a conversation with a chatbot.
This takes place through card style advertisements that can be clicked upon to engage into direct messages with the chatbot. You can also customize these cards and add up to 4 call to action buttons. Interestingly, the nature of these interactions is not to make more sales. So even if an option to purchase does pop up somewhere, it will likely come up after you have been chatting with the bot for a fair while.
These bots are more about building good interactions between companies and their potential customers than actively driving sales. If this seems to work out, for the brands, for the customers, and for Twitter itself — well, we could eventually see the company moving into more active monetization. For now though, it is more about light chatter.
The new cards are already in Beta. But you have to be an advertiser in order to access them. With its short message format and the Direct Messaging service, Twitter could be a good place for bots. However, we will have to wait for response from businesses to see how things turn out and whether, their bots were able to engage customers. Of course, there are other variables as well — such as how well the bots have been coded.
The company is not alone in hoping to drive consumer engagement through bots. Facebook of course, started out relatively earlier and already has a lot of bots on its platform – although, not all of them are necessarily fun or useful to interact with. Microsoft similarly has its bots framework and of late, it has started introducing bots to services like Skype and LinkedIn.
