Last week I covered the basics of chatbots. What they are good for, why businesses would want to use them, and some of the companies that offer them. This week I want to dive further into the chatbot system offered by ManyChat.

Today I’m going to show you a little bit of the backend of ManyChat’s dashboard and go through a few of the basic automation flows.

In this blog post, we’re going to look at some of the automation flows and setting up a basic flow using ManyChat.

I forgot, what is a chatbot again?

Just as a chatbot recap, an AI chatbot is software that can simulate a user conversation with a natural language through messaging applications, but as we learned last week these can also be set up in a more hybrid way to have preprogrammed responses along with real human interaction.

It’s a mobile-first world and people prefer chatting, 2.52 billion people use chat apps every day with that number expected to reach 3 billion by the end of this year. whether it’s Facebook messenger, Instagram messenger, WhatsApp, Twitter direct messages, telegram, wechat, or snapchat.

Why ManyChat

As I stated last week, I’ve been exploring opportunities with a chatbot system called ManyChat.

ManyChat Helps you chat directly with those people and enables you or your business to drive sales, get more leads, and ultimately allows direct connections to the customer by utilizing these same chat apps that they are already using.

Best of all ManyChat makes it easy enough for anyone to set up and launch in less than a day all while making it free to signup and start today.

The First Step

The first step is to connect your ManyChat account to your Facebook page that you manage. If you’re someone like me, you probably have hundreds of pages that you manage. It’s important to note that you can only connect one ManyChat account to one Facebook page at a time. Once you are connected to your Facebook, then you’ll be able to also connect to other platforms like Instagram. 

ManyChat Dashboard

The ManyChat dashboard is quite easy to navigate through, but is packed with features like adding in contacts, growth tools, live chat, Facebook ads, and automation templates. It’s this dashboard that you’ll spend most of your time in creating your different automation depending on what your goals are. The dashboard also provides help articles and blog articles that go through all of the different ways to utilize the platform. 

ManyChat Noob? Start Here!

There are plently of templates to explore within the dashboard from simple automation conversations to multifaceted complex conversations with your customers or fan base. However they best one that I think is the best one is the simple “Conversation Starters” this section allows you to set up simple questions that you can start out with whenever a user just clicks on the chat bubble. You can it set to show a faq page, show a product page, show your latest work, or simply start a simple conversation to help the user find what they are looking for. 

ManyChat

The Bottom Line

I’ve had an absolute blast learning the ins and outs of this chatbot system and while I don’t know the entire system yet, I do look forward to exploring it more to see how I can best utilize it for my business and also for my client’s businesses as well. 

Try out one or two of the chatbots that I talked about and see if they’ll work for you. Let me know down in the comments if you use a chatbot on your website or mobile app or let me know if you have any additional recommendations?

Curious to learn more?

Read: What are Chatbots and Do I Need Them?

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