This free service ‘ManyChat’ lets you create a Facebook Messenger bot within 2 minutes, without having to write code. It lets you engage with your Messenger audience by automatically subscribing anyone that starts to chat with you, & then sends them news, Content updates & pre-programmed answers to common questions. You can even broadcast messages to all subscribers at the same time.
Of late, bots, or programs that automate responses within chat apps, have been a hot topic of conversation. We’ve been covering chatbot creation systems for Messenger extensively ourselves (see our write-ups on Mockuuups, Botsify & Exponea). ManyChat is one more to add to the list, but it promises to be different, especially due to its ease of use & its many features.
Among its many claims to fame is its message scheduling feature, which lets you set up scheduled messages in advance. With the autoposting feature you can automatically post RSS feeds & other Content from outside sources to your Messenger bot, so that a Messenger broadcast will be triggered every time new content is posted.
ManyChat supports a wide variety of content types, which helps to increase engagement – pictures, text, links, messages with buttons & a horizontal slider with message cards inside. For new subscribers to your chat community, you can set up a custom welcome message that will greet them with pictures, sliders & menu options.
You can make your bot really functional & helpful to your users by using the keyword reply feature. This is done by setting up specific keywords & defining replies, then you can do things like create keyword menus, content catalogs & text based games. You can also create a deeper engagement experience by adding interactive messages, which add buttons to messages that you broadcast, where you trigger Content or direct users to outside Content, like YouTube video, a blog post, or to your Website.
ManyChat is based in San Francisco, California, USA, & is led by Mikael Yang, who is its CEO & co-founder. He states, in a communication elsewhere, that his company believes that messaging apps are set to become the next big channel for content consumption & audience engagement, & their aim is to help creators & non-tech people leverage these platforms.
ManyChat is free & you can use it by signing up with your Facebook account here.
– This post is merely a startup profile based on publicly available information & not a review. –
Image Credit: ManyChat
