With more than 1.3 billion active users, and growing fast, Facebook’s keener than ever to find ways to monetize Facebook
Messenger. But doing so comes with inherent challenges – advertising via message is highly interruption while stuffing ads
into Messenger screens has very limited potential. Facebook thought it had found an answer in Messenger bots – if users are
active on Messenger anyway, enabling them to communicate directly with brands on the same platform seems like a logical progression.
But while bot adoption is growing, it’s coming along slower than Facebook would like, with a key limitation being that smaller
businesses generally don’t have the technical know-how or resources to build their own bots, restricting take-up. So now,
Facebook’s come up with another option – though it’s a fairly risky move and one that could backfire quite easily.
As reported by
TechCrunch, Facebook’s rolling out a new test of a self-serve sponsored messaging tool, which will enable brands to mass-send
promotional messages to anyone who’s already initiated a conversation with them on the platform.
The process seems fairly straight-forward – businesses will be able to put together a message, add an image, then send it
out to a group of users who’ve communicated with them on Messenger in the past. They can segment that group by-product or
type of interaction to better target their messaging, and they can add a call to action button to streamline response.
And while it’s not hugely different from other social ad types in format, it’s likely more disruptive. While most people
wouldn’t have push notifications enabled for other types of ads, they generally do for messages – and when you get a Messenger
ping, expecting it to be a friend getting in touch, you might be disappointed to find that brand you messaged as a once-off
is now contacting you with offers. Targeting is obviously key. Participating brands will need to take extra care to ensure
relevance with their ad offers, while Facebook will also cap the number of messages any business can send to avoid overloading
users. Right now, the new option is available free of charge for businesses in the U.S., Mexico, and Thailand, though Facebook
says they’ll be looking to charge for the service down the road. As noted, it’s a risky move. TechCrunch highlights that
trusting less tech-savvy businesses to come up with compelling Messenger ads could lead to spam problems, while really, any
direct message ad is going to be interruptive. Getting it right will require a very fine balance. Given the challenges, it’s
hard to see this becoming a popular or widely used tool – but then again, Facebook’s been developing the option for some
time, and have no doubt done the math on the likely audience response. According to The Social Network, there are now more
than 2 billion messages sent between businesses and people on Messenger each month, while data shows that users are now more
receptive to being sent offers and the like from brands via messaging platforms.
