Meta Introduces AI Solutions for Enhanced Customer Engagement Through Direct Messages

Meta has recently launched new advertising opportunities for Messenger, powered by artificial intelligence in an effort to assist brands in tackling the trend of private messages over social posts to actively engage with their audiences.

New Q&A AI interaction to help facilitate customer interactions with organizations

Some of the ideas in testing include use of Artificial Intelligence in answering questions that may be asked by users. It aims at responding to frequently asked questions by businesses on Messenger and uses the bot to provide a personalized response. As you have seen in the examples provided above, this new feature is meant to help bots to look or sound more alive when responding to users. When the common questions are answered through the technology it will reduce the time that would have been used in responding to such questions and at the same time increase the orders if there is less interference from the business people. This system, based on Meta’s Llama 3 AI, is expected to be more versatile in terms of the types of queries it can handle as compared to prior bot tools. However, there will be some questions that the AI will not be able to answer due to the limitations to the amount of information that it is capable of processing, thus requiring further supervision by humans in such cases.

Evolution from Past Initiatives

Meta has previously considered such a bot solution, having previously worked on similar platforms – the Messenger Bots platform launched in 2016. Nevertheless, the first such bots failed to attract much attention, as people were content with having their messages answered by human operators or preferred to buy things online and offline, rather than communicating with robots. As to whether the latest and most sophisticated form of this AI system will have a better performance, that is yet to be answered. It might be possible that advanced AI can tend to give the feeling that to the users they are conversing with a real human thus increasing usage. However, there is some doubt as to the extent of interest users will have in interacting with bots, regardless of their artificial intelligence.

New Messaging Promotion Option

Apart from the AI Q&A feature, Meta is also releasing another messaging promotion feature. With this tool, marketers will be able to create, manage and publish paid marketing messages on messenger using the ads manager. Such messages will be sent to customers who willingly subscribe to receive messages from brands. This comes after Meta’s Conversations event held recently, which revealed that through Ads Manager, businesses could send marketing content via WhatsApp. Through the sharing of their subscriber list to Meta, businesses will be able to use the AI systems in identifying the appropriate subset of users to target for the intended objective, whether for lead conversion, product awareness creation, among others. Meta is planning to bring the same features to the Messenger as well in the future.

A harmonious integration of AI growth and user tastes

These new AI tools promise improved reach and better targeting, although they are simply next-generation versions of business messaging that Meta had already introduced. Over time, there has been low interest towards brand communication where consumers do not like to be directly addressed. The true test would, therefore, be whether the transition to private messaging will lead to better openness to promotions received in the users’ mailboxes. However, with Meta now extending the direct message outreach to all brands, it is yet to be seen whether this approach will work well in the intended sense of boosting engagement and conversions.