As a small business owner, you are surely already aware of the many ways in which recent technological advances have influenced the way you do business. In order to ensure your small business doesn’t get left behind amidst a rapidly changing marketplace, it’s vital that you incorporate the kinds of new technologies that will help your business thrive for many years to come.
And although Facebook Messenger is not exactly a “new” technology — at least not by today’s standards, as the platform was introduced back in April of 2016 — several recent developments have caused small business owners to reconsider why they need to incorporate the platform on an immediate basis.
Ismail Sirdah, outlined several ways his own small business has benefited from incorporating Facebook Messenger. In detailing how the platform has helped his photography business excel, Ismail Sirdah also highlighted some of the universal benefits available to small business owners who utilize Facebook Messenger to connect with their customers.
Reach Customers Where They Already Are
Perhaps the most compelling and salient rationale for incorporating Messenger into your small business is illustrated with a single statistic offered by Flurry Analytics: Over the last year, the amount of time spent on messaging platforms and social media increased by nearly 400 percent.
As Facebook recently pointed out, Messenger is designed to “communicate with users where they already are.” Judging by that 400 percent increase in time spent on social media and messaging, it’s evident that Messenger will indeed allow you to reach your customers quickly and easily, right where they already are.
Reduced Friction for Users
You might be wondering why you would want to use Facebook Messenger when you could reach your customer base through a mobile app of your own design. That is, until you consider the time and effort required to not only build the app, but also to convince your customers to go through the process of finding it, downloading it, and, most importantly, using it.
Even if the preceding steps were easy to carry out — and, just to be clear, they are not — getting your customers to use the app is still the most difficult obstacle to overcome: Even though apps account for 85 percent of the time users spend on smartphones, that time is dominated by an average of just five apps. This is why Facebook is touting Messenger as a “frictionless” platform, as it eliminates all the hurdles most likely to deter customers from using an app that fosters communication with your small business.
Compelling and Essential Interactions
When Messenger was first introduced, the automated chat agents were not nearly as sophisticated as they are today. The experiences your customers are exposed to through Facebook Messenger are far more robust than ever before, as they now feature location sharing, native payments, and complex interfaces, along with a number of other features that make the platform both compelling and essential for small business owners as well as their customers.
Messenger Enables Improvements in Customer Service, Acquisition, and Ecommerce
Facebook believes that small businesses will see tangible improvements in several key areas after incorporating Messenger, and Sirdah agrees that the platform delivers on that promise — especially when it comes to customer service, ecommerce, and customer acquisition. Using Messenger for customer service not only improved customer satisfaction among Sirdah’s customers, but it also served as an ideal medium through which the small business owner could re-engage customers in order to drive revenue.
Other companies have detailed similar improvements after incorporating Messenger into their small business, and it just seems to make intuitive sense that conversion rates would increase following a switch from something like a passive registration form to a direct communication channel capable of engaging potential customers in such a meaningful way.
Of course, there are other reasons why you need to be using Facebook Messenger for your small business, but the ones outlined by Sirdah and others clearly illustrate that the platform already provides more than enough tangible, immediate benefits for small business owners. Combined with the fact that your customers are only going to be spending more and more time on social media and messaging platforms, there is no sound reason for any further delay when it comes to the inclusion of Messenger as a critical communication tool for your small business.