My fascination with bots started way before Mark Zuckerberg announced them somewhere around April 2016. Apps like Kik and WeChat already had bots in them and it was fascinating to see how messaging apps are becoming something more. There were a lot of apps on the market that could easily be replaced with a chatbot.
That’s enough history, I am sure you know what chatbots are and how they work by now. What I want you to get out of this text is the value and the untapped territory that is facebook messenger. So let’s start with how I made this campaign.
Picking the right lead magnet
Everything starts with an incentive. What are you offering and does that matter to the people you target? In my example, I was offering conference ticket worth 300$. Nothing special but I didn’t really ask for that standard (like, share, comment) to get it. All you had to do was to click on the ad and respond “yes” once the chat opens. Worth a try.
Promoting to the most passionate niche and let them start the viral loop
There are two things that we can do as Facebook marketers. Cry about how Facebook is running the reach of FB pages or move over to something that is untapped. It’s not like your Facebook page delivered results in the last couple of years now, is it? What that means is that you should find a really niche audience that would really want to get the prize you are offering and pay to boost the post to them. I was in luck since I have the experience of who exactly are my most engaged users. Once we got those 30–40 first subscribers we can start the viral loop.
The growth tools
Manychat’s Growth Tools
What I wanted to do is make it super simple for people to actually engage in a chat. So, I used two of manychat’s growth tools. If you are not familiar with manychat it is a facebook bot service that is well above all other platforms for creating your bot. The pricing plan and the features that Manychat has are just incomparable with other services. But let’s get back to our setup.
- The first tool that I used is a “comment” growth tool which automatically gets people engaged in a chat if they comment on your post. We will see why I use this in a bit.
- The main growth tool used in this promotion is the “Messenger Ref URL”. What this tool does is it set’s an opt-in message and sequence of messages to follow once the user opt-ins. Once our user clicks on the post in the ad it opens up messenger and gets them engaged in a chat. Boom! See a tutorial on how to use this tool here.
- The welcome message on your page has to match the offer that you are promoting right now. Keep in mind some of the people that will see the image in their feed will open up your Facebook page and not click directly on the ad. Although small, we have to make sure that we engage this audience as well.
- The opt-in messages on each growth tool and the welcome message have to be with the same CTA. Get users to say “yes”. So my opt-in message was something like: “Hey {{First Name}}, do you want to get this free ticket?”.
That’s it. Three growth tools are what gets the job done. Moving on.
The viral loops
Here are three possible scenarios that can happen now:
- A user clicks on your post and get’s greeted by our Messenger Ref URL widget. If he/she responds in the chat we have him as a subscriber.
- Users comments on your Facebook post and the bot automatically pops up and asks the same sentence as the first growth tool. Once they type in yes or anything else really, they become your subscribers.
- Someone wants to engage in a chat and clicks the main CTA button on your Facebook page which in this case should be “Send a message”. Once they do, they are automatically greeted by our bot and again, if they respond they are in.
Now, here is how we do these viral loops.
Viral loop 1: Once they respond from the #1or #2 growth tool we can send a follow-up message. This can be literally anything so let’s use it wisely. What I did is follow-up with something like this: “To make sure that you get more points and increase your chance to win send the following link to your friends (more friends = more points). https://www.m.me/xxxxx”. This link is a direct link to your messenger page and whoever clicks on it will be greeted by our welcoming message and opted in to engage in a chat and be our subscriber. If they do engage, then they also receive this message and so on and so forth. You get my point here. If one user brings in 10 and those 10 bring in 10 we have an exponential growth. Note: I didn’t really count “points” although I am sure this can be done.
Viral loop 2: After 2 hours of becoming a subscriber I want to double down on virality again. So, here is the magic. In manychat there is an option to send broadcasts to all or some of your subscribers. First of all, we have to make sure that a certain user does not receive the same broadcast every two hours so after I send a broadcast to one batch I tag them and the next broadcast goes to everyone that is not tagged. This is super simple. Go to Audience -> Bulk Actions -> Tag users. Now your broadcast should say something like this: “One tip from us: Tagging users on the post actually gets you even more points”. Here is why this is mind-blowingly awesome. First, once they tag their friends your post gets a lot of organic reach and even more people opt-in. Second, the friends who are tag tend to respond to the tag and comment on it. Well, surprise — our comment widget responds to them and gets them to opt-in also in chat. If they do they are greeted by our viral loop 1 and so on and so forth. Cool right?
And that’s basically it. Those 6$ in ad spent was just to get the first 30–40 people to opt-in and after that the viral loops took charge. Please use this wisely and don’t spam.
P.S. I am an engineering student that left coding for doing growth. Let’s connect on facebook.
Me getting my Bachelor degree last month. Totally not related to the post — I just like the pic.
P.P.S. ClapsO-meter 10->🙂 20 ->😀 30 ->😁 40 ->🤩 50 ->🤪