Ensuring that your brand is getting the most from its marketing strategies is a fundamental aspect of good management. Many online brands have discovered that there are countless ways in which to reach new consumers, market products and generate leads. One such way that is more popular than ever is social media.

All too often, businesses establish a basic social media presence but never optimize it for lead generation and conversions. Facebook in particular is ground zero for this failure: what good are business pages if you have to micromanage every little detail?

Today, we’ll look at how you can utilize chatbots on Facebook to field inquiries, and discuss whether this is a good choice for your brand specifically.

How Chatbots Can Help Brands

Understanding just what benefits chatbots can provide on Facebook is essential in making a decision for your own particular needs. Ultimately, the increasing prevalence of these bots is emerging due to the ease of use they provide to consumers and the benefits provided to brands. Rather than pinging your website, calling your phone or blowing up your inbox, they can quickly receive answers here.

The biggest advantage to deploying a chatbot on Facebook is the fact that it can streamline your customer service experience. Facebook in particular limits exactly how much custom information you can display on pages; elements such as FAQs are hard to feature prominently. You of course can direct people to your website, but this asks more of the customer than is necessary.

With chatbots, most common and basic inquiries can be handled in real time. Whether it’s providing answers to FAQs, supplying contact information, directing users to relevant web pages or even providing directions, these tools can help minimize the amount of legwork required by you.

Which Brands Can Benefit?

Most notably, chatbots can help brands that experience a large volume of inquiries on Facebook on a daily basis.  These chatbots can help direct people, answer questions and minimize the amount of work needed to generate the best outcomes for your brand or business.

Likewise, if you’re a small business or part-time endeavor that does not have the ability to respond to questions immediately 24/7, then a chatbot can be beneficial. For example, Facebook ranks pages based on what percentage of messages they respond to and how quickly they respond. A chatbot can help ensure quick responses are always given, night or day.

Building a Chatbot

There are many utilities available that can help you put together a custom chatbot for Facebook in relatively little time. Online, a quick search for “Facebook bot builder” will unearth many different options that are available. Some are for heavily-customized versions that require developer experience, while others are drag-and-drop solutions that can provide basic functionality for fielding inquiries.

Once complete, integration with Facebook can be done via widgets and questions handled via Messenger. You can even configure these utilities so that inquiries result in people pinging your website and pages for more detailed information and precise answers.

While not all brands inherently need a chatbot for Facebook, many can benefit. Fielding basic questions automatically helps free up time for you and ensures your consumers receive prompt responses 24/7.