While you were busy running your business, Facebook released an update for their Chat Plugin on August 4th, 2020. The recent change benefits anyone with a website!
Before Aug 4th, if you had a Facebook chat widget on your website, you could only chat with people IF they signed into their Facebook account. This login requirement increases friction and lowers the number of people who can interact with your brand. With the login requirement removed, website owners are seeing 10%-35% more users wanting to engage with them. Customer engagement is critical if your business wants to answer the final questions the customer has before they make their purchase.
To save you time, I’ve summarized what you should know about the new change and how to take advantage of Messenger chat.
Consumers expect instant answers and are not going to wait around for the business to reply. The customer will find another place that can provide the answers to their questions immediately. Facebook Chat and the removal of the requirement for the user to sign in to Facebook means now you can chat with everyone on your website, and you don’t need to purchase any website chat software.
I won’t go into details here, but you can find the code and install instructions for installing a Facebook chat widget on your website here.
By default, you should see guest chat is turned on, but if you don’t see an option in your chat widget to ‘Continue as guest’, take a look at the image below for how to edit this in your Facebook settings.
This term strikes fear in the hearts of many, but for the new Facebook Guest mode feature, it’s all part of the program and NOT a bad thing. The ‘UNSUBSCRIBES’ you see are people who already had a chat with you or bot (as a guest) AND did not sign into the Messenger website chat. They can talk to your business messenger bot, and you live just as if they were signed into FB Messenger. HOWEVER, Facebook wants to prohibit you from talking to anyone who did not login to messenger after they leave your website or after 24hrs, whichever comes first.
The user who doesn’t login to Facebook Messenger automatically triggers ‘unsubscribe,’ and you will see this in your notification. This notification isn’t a user saying, “I no longer what to hear from X again, where is the unsubscribe button.”
Example of Guest Chat Vs. Logged In User:
The user name and picture are displayed vs. “Guest XXX”
Example of ‘The guest has left the chat and automatically unsubscribed’
End Result: When every sale/visit counts, don’t turn away website visits looking for answers. Install your free Facebook Messenger chatbot now and start answering more pre-sales questions.
We build marketing & system automation to remove the manual and repetitive tasks. Businesses benefit from automation by freeing staff to work on things that no computer can solve. Marketing automation also allows our clients to communicate with their customers at a simple level without needed to involve a human until they are ready to buy.
Author: Jason Pulliam
Jason Pulliam is an avid researcher of technology and marketing. He enjoys figuring out ways to automate tasks and increase the personalization of the customer’s online journey. When Jason isn‘t pushing all the buttons to see what they do, he’s a nutty husband to his wife, Jada, and proud father for his two daughters. Jason enjoys all cold things, in every sense of the word, and you might find him working inside a fridge if that were possible.
