Andrew McCauley introduces chatbots with a concise definition (Oxford Dictionary) and focuses specifically on Facebook Messenger chatbots and their marketing uses. He demonstrates live examples (Fandango, Spotify, Lego), explains basic capabilities (personalized greetings via Facebook data, guided "choose-your-path" flows, ticket purchases/payments), and teases follow-up content covering benefits, setup, and sales impact for businesses (including small businesses).
Chapters
Everywhere you go today, people seem to be talking about chatbots. What is a chatbot? I'm going to discuss that today and show you exactly why you probably already used a chatbot and didn't even realize it. Hey, there. My name is Andrew McCauley, and I'm excited to be showing you all about the latest thing that's going on in marketing Chatbots. Now, if you've been around anywhere on the Internet, whether it's Facebook or any of the other social sites, you are sure to have seen a chatbot around. Maybe you don't recognize it, maybe you have seen it before. But let's talk about what is a chatbot technically, according to the Oxford Dictionary, a chatbot. Is this a computer program designed to simulate conversation with human users, especially over the Internet? Now, that all sounds pretty techy. So let's break it down and show you some examples first of what a chatbot looks like. And then it will help you understand how they work. Now, when we're talking about chatbots, I'm going to be talking specifically about Facebook chatbots and their messenger marketing services. So when we talk about bots, there's many types of different bots or chatbots in the marketplace today is all about Facebook. Because Facebook, let's face it, is the biggest platform, platform, socially in the world, and it has been for a number of years. They are spending a lot of money and a lot of time making sure that messenger marketing, or chatbots is their future. They see how this is really panning out to the rest of the world. So that's why they're spending a lot of money and effort in making these things work. So let's have a look at an example that you may or may not have seen. And by the way, you can go and check these out because they're real live bots that are running right now. Here's one, for instance. Fandango. Now, Fandango is a company, if you haven't seen it before, sells movie tickets. And if you have a look on this image here, you can see that when you click on the blue send message button, it pops up with a message and it says, welcome to the Fandango bot. I can help you get the latest show times guarantee tickets and watch trailers. Your perfect movie night is just a search away. Now, on automatically, you can see that they're doing a number of things. They're giving you information. They're showing you ticket prices and ticket locations. They're also giving you the ability to watch trailers, and you can purchase things through the bot. Yes, that's right. These bots through Facebook let you accept money for your business. Now, just because I'm showing you some large companies here doesn't mean you have to be a large company as well. You certainly can be a small company to install a bot. We have done it for many, many businesses that are very, very small, and they are getting some fantastic results. Well, let's go back to this Fandango bot and show you what it looks like. So when you click on the get started button, you're going to see it pops up and instantly it says, hi, Andrew. Now, how does it know who I am? It already collects that data from Facebook. Facebook is willing to give us that information. So we don't even need to ask the person's name name. We're collecting it from their Facebook account. In this case here, it says, buying movie tickets with friends is easier than ever. You can see that there's some options down the bottom. You can make a choice. Now, if you've ever read one of those, choose your own adventure books. That's what this is like. You get to choose the pathway that you want to go down as a customer. Now, as the owner of the business, you also get to help that customer on their journey. You get to select the criteria and the questions and answers that you want them to answer. And you can lead them on a path. Maybe it's a path of discovery, maybe it's a path of selling something. Maybe it's a path of booking time with you as well. As you can see here, with Fandango, they're giving you some options about movies, some theaters, and some trending stuff as well. If you click on one of those, it will take you to the next part of it. Here's another example. Spotify, the great music app that's out there, a lot of people downloaded. You can see that 21 million people like Spotify. When you click on their bot, they give you, of course, they know your name, they give you the ability, or they're asking you questions of what kind of music you like. And as you click on a certain type or brand, it gives you a whole selection down the bottom there. So it lets you go through a series of steps to actually take you through the process of that bot. And there's another one out there. Lego. Lego is a great bot. I'm going to give you the link here. You can see down below this video, there's a link to the Lego bot. Go and check it out. It does some really, really cool stuff as well. There's some examples of what bots look like. In the rest of this series, we're going to go through a whole range of other things, like the benefits of bots. How do they help businesses? Why should companies use bots? How do you even start a chatbot? And do chatbots increase sales? So check out the rest of our articles around bots, because we loving showing people how to use bots. We love bots. We're putting a lot of our energy and time into bots. And I think you should understand and educate yourself about them and how you can use them for your business. So I'll see you on the next video.
