How to develop a bot for Facebook Messenger and list it at the Facebook Bot Store?

So, you are an early adopter who wants to create a chatbot for Facebook Messenger and list it at the Facebook Bot Store. Exciting, isn’t it? I know!

OK, so we’ve started developing bots 9 years ago, when most of the internet users hadn’t even seen one. Millions of dollars in saved customer service costs, and dozens of millions of answers later, we believe that we’re now at a tipping point. Let me tell you why…

Our bots have been operating on our customers’ websites, mobile apps, Smart TV’s or kiosks, basically any platform with IP connectivity. Although we have developed a couple of them to work on Facebook pages, one thing was common:

Users had to come to those bots to interact with them.

So, users had to be pulled. Pulled to visit a website, to download an app, to a physical device, etc.

Not anymore. (And this is huge!)

Because now bots (read BRANDS) will interact with the users where they already are. (Monthly active) 800 million of them. On a platform that they open on their browser, or an app that they use, each and every day! This is revolutionary!

On the other hand, it is also pretty ordinary. Why would anyone need to download an app for every brand, just to use it occasionally? It took us 1.6 million Android, and 1.5 million IOS apps to realize that, in fact, we didn’t need that many.

Aside from the reports that suggest Artificial Intelligence will be in every aspect of our every day life as early as 2020, and that Millenials who will account for 40% of all consumers prefer using self service channels over talking to a customer service rep, it’s now obvious: Bots are the easy way to conduct almost every economic transaction. And they will be as ordinary as mobile apps (but more efficient) in less than a year.

If you want to know how to use the Facebook Chat SDK to develop a Facebook Messenger Bot, please don’t be upset and check back in a short while, after the SDK is released publicly by Facebook. But in the meantime, if you need to have someone with lots of experience develop a Facebook Messenger Bot for you, visit our website to contact us.

If you represent a brand or a digital agency who doesn’t plan to take action for being on the Facebook Messenger platform today, there’s a good chance that you will need to contact us sometime soon. (In fact, I can bet $100 that someone in your organization will bring this up in a meeting within a 6-month time frame, if not sooner.)

So if you can’t find a way to get back to this article again, you can visit http://WhatWasThatBotCompany.com to reconnect with us :)

This article will be updated as soon as we’ll be able to comment on the SDK.

Ekim Nazim Kaya
Co-founder
Botego