Last month, Facebook rolled out a series of improvements to the company’s app services at its annual F8 developer conference. Among the highly anticipated announcements, Facebook’s commitment to serve and grow the developer community through two products, Messenger and Parse, stood out.
At DevelopmentNow, we’re especially excited about Facebook’s big news concerning Messenger. The social media company is elevating Messenger from a simple chat app to a dynamic new content-rich ecosystem with the launch of the Facebook Messenger Platform.
Development teams like us are now able to build apps that integrate with Messenger to provide users with a richer experience. The Messenger Platform enables apps to publish content into a chat feed, giving credit for the content to that specific app. If a user sends a message with app content to someone who does not have the app installed on their mobile device, an install link is sent with the message. This has massive implications for app discovery and viral content consumption.
But wait, there’s more.
Messenger isn’t just for chatting with friends anymore. Facebook is also bringing businesses into the Messenger ecosystem by offering a new Messenger integration option in shopping carts for ecommerce sites. If a buyer enables Messenger during the checkout process, they will receive package tracking updates and purchase receipts.
What does this mean for our clients? A lot!
Here are a few reasons we’re excited to explore the potential use cases of the new Facebook Messenger Platform with our clients:
App Engagement
Over 500 million people have the standalone Messenger app installed on their mobile devices since Facebook removed messaging functionality from their main mobile app. Until now there has not been a way for apps to access Facebook users within Messenger. Just like placing app content straight into the Newsfeed led to skyrocketing engagement during the heyday of Zynga, we think that delivering app content within the chat stream offers the same potential for sharply increasing app engagement. More app engagement can translate into increased revenue for our clients depending upon their business model.
App Discovery
According to the Facebook Developers Blog:
Some Messenger integrations will also have the opportunity to be featured directly in Messenger via a new tab in Messenger conversations. The tab provides shortcuts to apps people have already installed, as well as new apps they might be interested in trying.
Apps currently featured include Bitmoji, ESPN, Clips, and more.
Apps that are not lucky enough to be featured on the new tab will still have the opportunity to capitalize on Messenger’s app discovery potential. If a message recipient does not have a specific app installed but receives content from that app from a message sender, that user will be presented with an app install link in the chat stream.
We believe that providing a new place for users to discover apps outside of the Newsfeed in the Facebook mobile app will help boost the install rates of our clients’ apps.
Ecommerce
Offering real-time interaction regarding purchases to customers via their mobile devices is a pain for most retailers. Now retailers can easily do this with Messenger.
To seamlessly integrate their online shopping experience with their mobile devices, customers simply tap to enable Messenger at checkout. According to Facebook, customers will be able to “choose to start a conversation with a business, receive updates from that business on things like order confirmations and shipping status updates, and ask the business free-form questions about the order, receiving quick responses,” once they enable Messenger.
So what’s the catch?
Customers will be giving Facebook their online purchase history in exchange for convenience.
Currently, only two retailers are partnering with Facebook for this feature: Everlane and Zulilly. Facebook is planning to use Zendesk for their customer service partner.
We can’t wait to see the adoption rates for Messenger integration on these two partners sites. If customers of Everlane and zulily can see the value early on, we’ll be sure to talk to our future clients about how Messenger Integration can help increase their customer retention and satisfaction as well. “…it will be exciting to see how Messenger integration can increase our clients’ customer retention and satisfaction as well.”
Analytics for Apps
Finally, we’re pumped for the new Analytics for Apps dashboard. Since it was developed for marketers who want to measure the performance of their app across platforms, the dashboard helps identify how far the user made it down the marketing funnel. For example, analytics for Apps tells marketing teams if a user purchased an item within the app after they installed it. The dashboard also displays events, cohorts, and segments data. Most importantly, the attribution tab will soon reveal the performance of mobile app ads across ad networks.
We want our clients to be successful in launching the apps we’ve helped them build. With Facebook’s new Analytics for Apps, measuring the marketing success of mobile apps against key performance indicators has never been easier.
So there you have it folks! Facebook just got a whole lot more attractive when it comes to maximizing the return on your development investment when it comes to social integration. If you are interested in learning more about how our development team can help you take advantage of these new Facebook features for your app, email us. We will be happy to talk about it.
