Say the words “social media,” and likely the first app to come to mind is Facebook. Recently, social media giant Facebook has made big changes to another of its apps, Facebook Messenger. Though private messaging has been a feature of Facebook since 2008, it wasn’t until 2015 that the company began allowing businesses and companies to interact using Messenger. It was around this same time that the app began to experience significant user growth. The app grew from 600 million users in 2015 to more than 1.2 billion by 2017, according to TechCrunch. This number of users actually doubles the number of users on Facebook’s other app, Instagram.
Not only are there huge numbers of people merely on the app, but there are huge numbers of people who are actively interacting with businesses big and small via Facebook Messenger. According to a Facebook Messenging Survey by Nielson, 53% of people say “they are more likely to do business with a business they can message.” Because people are already using Facebook messenger for daily personal communication, it only makes sense for them to feel at ease contacting businesses using the same platform.
A recent study from Pew Research “found that Messaging is the dominant communication option among teens, with nothing else even coming close.” Companies whose target audiences are millennials or younger generations would be amiss not to take full advantage of using Messenger as a means of communications with their clientele. Social Media Today comments on this statistic by saying, “brands need to be where their customers are most active, thus messaging is a logical platform.”
To summarize, if small businesses want to communicate easily and efficiently with their audiences, one of the best ways to do that is via Facebook Messenger. Over a billion people log into Facebook regularly and are already using Messenger to connect with friends, colleagues, and other businesses. Not using Facebook Messenger as a communication tool for your small business is going to put your business behind the curve of those that are.
The great thing about jumping onto the Facebook Messenger bandwagon is that it’s easy and simple to do! The odds are that you already have a Facebook Page set up and have already begun to develop a following on the site. What you need to do now is tap into this audience and communicate with them via the messaging app to increase the level of customer service you can provide to your current audience.
Do you want to integrate Facebook Messenger into your small business’s social media marketing plan? We at VisionPath Marketing would love to help! Contact us for a free consultation.