While some digital marketers are still discovering the power of social media, those who are on the cutting edge of technological progress are raising awareness about chatbots and how to build a bot.
The rapid rise of chatbots has been made possible thanks to the recent advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Younger generations of consumers, who have grown up with at least one chat window permanently opened, find it natural to communicate with their favorite brands and companies through interactive messenger chatbots that mimic real conversations with people.
By integrating chatbots with e-commerce platforms, it’s possible to monetize existing social media accounts by helping consumers find products or offering personalized recommendations based on their instant messaging profiles and personal preferences.
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How to Build a Bot. No Coding Needed
Soon after some of the first chatbots had made news headlines, chatbot platforms and tools appeared. With them, anyone can make a chatbot without coding. They take care of the nitty-gritty technical wizardry that happens in the background every time somebody sends a message to a chatbot.
If you would like to enter the exciting world of chatbots, Facebook Messenger is the right place to create a chatbot. There are already many interesting chatbots used by millions of Facebook’s users, and the company clearly wants to introduce chatbots to as many people as possible.
We have selected our top 5 favorite Facebook bot platforms that allow you to create a chatbot without coding. But if you need a custom chatbot solution, for example – with CRM integration, all of these platforms functionality is kind of limited. In this case, you can contact us.
Chatfuel
Created in 2015 as a chatbot platform focused on Telegram, Chatfuel has grown to become one of the most used Facebook messenger bot platforms in existence. So far, Almost 50,000 Facebook chatbots have been created using Chatfuel.
The platform promises that anyone can launch a full-featured chatbot in 10 minutes. This is possible thanks to the intuitive user interface that breaks down the entire chatbot creation process into several simple steps. A Facebook chatbot created using Chatfuel can offer services, answer questions, share info about your company, notify users about upcoming events, and more.
Besides Facebook, Chatfuel also integrates with a host of other websites and services, including Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube, just to name a few. The long list of Chatbot’s customers includes big names such as MTV, TechCrunch, BuzzFeed, and Volkswagen.
Botsify
Botsify allows businesses and organizations of all sizes to hop on the chatbot bandwagon without learning how to make bots the hard way.
Trusted by Apple, Shazam, Grin, Tictane, and 20,000 other brands
Its drag and drop interface revolves around pre-designed templates, which can be easily adapted for various purposes and extended via plugins and JSON API. At the heart of every Botsify bot is a smart artificial intelligence capable of learning new sentences and phrases over time. Because it takes some time for the AI to learn how to interact with users, human operators can take over chat from chatbot anytime.
Botsify integrates with popular chatbot analytics tools, including Dashbot.io, and the service starts at $10 per month for the basic plan. A free plan is available for users who can get by with a single bot and up to 100 users.
Motion
Motion answers the question of how to create a chatbot without coding with its innovative flowchart-like chatbot creation process. With Motion, you can create Facebook bots free of charge. You can also create bots for a host of other platforms and services, including Slack and Smooch.
Even though Motion is meant for people who can’t code, it allows users to directly play with the underlying Node.js code directly from the editing interface. The easy access to the code makes integrating Motion bots with third-party APIs, databases, and services much easier than it would be otherwise.
The free plan allows you to work on your bot for free and update to a paid plan only when you’ve gained some traction. The pricing starts with $15 for up to 5 bots.
The free plan includes up to 2 bots and up to 1,000 messages per month
Itsalive
Itsalive is a progressive Facebook chatbot platform that allows anyone to create digital assistants that automatically respond to users. Itsalive bots are pre-programmed to detect groups of keywords and respond accordingly. They can also send notifications, keep users engaged by coping and pasting the content from your RSS feeds, and more.
Each bot can be analyzed to determine its performance and configured to periodically perform certain tasks. You can organize your fleet of chatbots into folders and see all the keywords your Facebook chatbots have missed and easily add them to new or existing recipes.
Conclusion
Even though chatbots are still the new kid on the digital marketing block, there are already several polished tools on the market that allow even less technically inclined people to create chatbots without ever having to write a line of code. As the demand for chatbots increases, we expect new platforms to emerge and existing platforms to introduce more features and even deeper integrations with various services. If you feel that your business could benefit from chatbots, we encourage you to give them a try.
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