Go to the profile of Matt Schlicht
Matt Schlicht
CEO of Octane AI, Founder of Chatbots Magazine, YC Alum, Forbes 30 Under 30, product at Ustream for 4 years (sold for $130mil).

The Complete Beginner’s Guide to Growing Your Audience on Facebook Messenger

This is how you reach 1 billion people.

How do you grow your audience on Facebook Messenger? Why would you grow your audience on Messenger? What are the best-practices? What tools and tactics can you use?

These are the questions we’re going to answer for you right now.

Ready? Let’s do this.

Requirements:

Why You Want To Grow Your Audience on Messenger

Why would you even want to build an audience on Messenger? Isn’t it just an app that let’s people message their friends?

Great question.

Here’s the thing. Over 1 billion people use Messenger every month. That means that it is larger than Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat COMBINED.

It’s ok that you don’t have an audience on Messenger yet, don’t worry. Up until now the only thing Messenger could be used for was one-to one communication.

This is changing though.

For the first time ever, businesses and personalities can now build massive audiences on Messenger. This is enabled by a new technology, called bots, that Facebook released and Octane AI has made very useful.

You need to pay attention to this. It’s a massive opportunity.

  • There are over 1 billion people who use Messenger every month.
  • You can now build massive audiences on Messenger.
  • You don’t currently have an audience on Messenger.
  • Everyone is going to do this, but those who start early have a better shot at rapid growth.

What can you do with an audience on Messenger? Simple.

  • Get followers.
  • Send your followers real-time push notifications that pop up on their phones. You can use this to talk to them, send them announcements, content, and more.

If you understand this opportunity, then you should immediately be shifting a ton of your focus to building an audience on Messenger.

Imagine being able to communicate, instantly, with thousands or even millions of people. Not by sharing a blog post with them, or by sending them a video, but by having one-on-one conversations with all of them at the same time (I know you may not yet be able to visualize what this looks like, but bear with me).

Because you can reach people in real-time, building an audience on Messenger is more powerful than your email list or any of your other social media accounts.

So how do you build this audience?

The next section will explain.

The High-Level Strategy to Growing Your Audience on Messenger

The strategy to grow your audience on Messenger is the same as it is on any other platform.

  • Create great content.
  • Share your great content everywhere.
  • People automatically begin following you when they engage with your content.
  • The more followers you get the larger your distribution on the platform becomes. Now you can share your future content with more people and the entire cycle repeats itself.

This is how you grow a blog, a YouTube channel, an Instagram account, and pretty much anything on the internet.

Now we’re using this strategy to grow your audience on Facebook Messenger.

If you follow this plan, I guarantee that your bot will become a crucial part of your marketing strategy. Forever.

The first question you need to answer is, “How do I create content for Messenger?”

I will answer this right now. Let’s begin.

How to Create Content for Messenger

The same way you create articles for a blog, you can create “Convos” for your bot. Convos are incredibly engaging, fun, and there are an infinite number of ways you can use them.

I know this concept of a convo is new to you, so I will explain what it is.

Convos are conversations, prewritten by you, that take place between your bot and your audience. Your bot says something, your audience can respond by tapping a button, and then your bot responds, and so on. These convos can be as short or as long as you want.

  • You can create as many convos as you want, about any topic you want.
  • You can share them with your bot’s audience via a push notification and you can share them on Social Media via a unique URL.
  • It’s almost identical to sharing a blog post except it is conversational.
  • At the end of every convo, your audience is prompted to share the convo with their friends and to follow your bot on Messenger.

Here are a couple examples of convos. You will see that the convo is continued by tapping a button that contains a prewritten response.

Convos are conversational because that is the most natural way to interact with something on Messenger. It is a conversational platform so it makes sense that it’s content would be conversational too.

The best part about convos, is that that they are incredible easy to make. It’s actually just as easy, if not easier, than writing a blog post.

This is what it looks like when you are writing a convo for your bot on Octane AI.

You write out what the bot says and then write out what buttons your audience can select to continue the convo. You can even link these buttons to tangents or entirely different convos.

Convos can be used to:

  • Tell a story.
  • Teach someone how to do something.
  • Tell jokes.
  • Share exclusive content.
  • Anything. The honest truth is that we aren’t completely sure of everything you could do with convos. There is a lot of opportunity for you to discover the best way to use them.

I encourage you to experiment A LOT with convos. It’s up to you to figure out the best way to use them.

Now that you understand what convos are, you are ready to start creating content for your bot.

Ready to learn how to promote your bot and your convos?

The 10 Best Ways to Promote Your Bot and Your Convos

There are an infinite number of ways to promote your bot and your convos, however here are a few which are excellent starting points. If you discover a new way, please let me know.

  1. Release content that can only be found exclusively through your bot.
  2. Regularly share links to your bot and your convos on social media.
  3. Change your website URLs in your social media profiles to link to your bot (the URL for a Messenger Bot is m.me/your-page’s-name, for example mine is m.me/messagematt).
  4. Make a video about your bot and share this on social media. Include a link to your bot or a specific convo.
  5. Include a link to your bot in the description text of your YouTube videos.
  6. Add a link or button to your website that links to your bot.
  7. Include a call to action in your emails and newsletters that encourages people to message your bot.
  8. Change the featured button on your Facebook page to “Send Message”.
  9. Share your convos with your friends.
  10. Share your convos with your bot’s followers.

Treat these best practices as a starting point. They are not the only way to promote a bot and grow an audience on Messenger.

I expect you to experiment A LOT, which brings me to my next, and most important, point…

Experiment A LOT

There are a billion people on Messenger every month, and the opportunity to grow an audience is there, but it’s up to you to figure out how to do it your way.

Make all sorts of convos. Make crappy convos. Make great convos. Make silly convos. Experiment, experiment, experiment, experiment.

This is uncharted territory, and we don’t know all the answers. At Octane AI we have simply created a platform that enables you to experiment with conversational content, now it’s up to you to figure out what to do with it.

Have at it.

p.s. I am the CEO of Octane AI and I would absolutely love to hear from you. If you ever want to chat, ping me on Twitter, or of course… you can always message my bot.

Click here to read “Best Practices for Writing Convos”