As the world gets more and more advanced in terms of technology, we wonder how we can put it to good use and make our own lives easier. One of the ways to incorporate the advancing technology in to your social media presence is to use automated messages and chatbots.
As with anything in life there are pros and cons to this automation, but it just depends on how you want your business to be seen by users.
So what’s the difference between automated messages and chatbots? Automated messages can be quite useful for your business. For Facebook automated messages are built into the platform and it’s simply a case of turning them on and choosing your settings, but for Instagram and Twitter you have to use 3rd party apps to set up your automation. There are apps that are “100% endorsed” by the platforms, but they come at a price. Automated messages can be set up in a variety of ways, including:
- Instant welcome messages to new followers
- Instant replies to incoming messages directing to a website
- Instant out of office replies
- Mass DMs informing followers of new promotions
All of which can be very useful and save you lots of time.
Chatbots can be used for a sort of instant messaging that can be either linked to your social media or even embedded on to your website. To install a chatbot onto your site a 3rd party app will need be installed. Many of which are very easy to set up and require no knowledge of how to code. The chatbots can have conversations with users regarding services your business offers, but these conversations can only take place once you have given the bot potential questions for it to ask and potential answers to those questions. This may take a bit of time to set up but in the long run it will be able to weed out any “tire kickers” and also point people in the right direction, giving you more time to do other, more important things.
There is a con to chatbots though, they tend to be quite annoying as they are usually pop ups in the corner of the screen, which if accidentally clicked take up most of the screen leaving you scrambling for the close button. Another con to chatbots are the fact that they are robots. They take the human element out of the business and to me a little bit of the spark goes with it. Yes, you can program them to be as human as you want and to say anything you like but in the back of your mind you know you aren’t really talking to anyone. Again, whether this is a con to you or not depends on how you like to run your business.
In summary, automation does in truth make life online that little bit easier but it needs to be done correctly. Too many automated messages and they become spam, and if your chatbot isn’t perfect, it will ruin website.
