As we move on to 2018, and beyond we have noticed a gradual change in the use of social media among the general public. We have noticed that most social activities are occurring in private groups and chats on individual messaging apps rather than on open social networking platforms.

With the rise of chatbots and other advanced messaging apps, the use of social media seems to be fundamentally changing at a slow but steady pace.

So why did this social media downfall happen? The main culprit is us; nobody else.

Open social media platforms have a huge amount of privacy issues. Then other issues cropped up from the likes of stalking to abuses to racist remarks etc. And do you remember those annoying ads? Well, even those ads created problems.

Private conversations solved this problem to a certain extent. Thus, messaging apps gained significance and prominence.

The power shift

Let’s be honest. The power shift isn’t actually happening; it has already happened. Messaging apps have already surpassed social media in almost every channels of our life.

Let’s take a peek at the number of active users that the major messaging apps have.

• WhatsApp: 1 billion* monthly active users.
• Facebook messenger: 800 million* monthly active users.
• WeChat: 650 million* monthly active users.
• Viber: 250 million* monthly active users.
• Line: 215 million* monthly active users.
• Snapchat: 100 million* daily active users.

[*→ estimated]

Just look at those numbers. Humongous; isn’t it? Facebook recognized this trend ages ago and that’s the sole reason for which they developed a standalone messaging app of their own: the Facebook messenger. .

The rise of messengers also prompted Facebook to acquire the largest and the most popular messaging app in the world- WhatsApp.

So there’s no doubt that the power shift has already happened.

Marketing through messengers

The transition from open social media to private messaging apps created one of the biggest challenges in digital marketing realms.

However where’s there’s a will, there’s a way. And we came up with one of the best possible solutions which in itself had the potentials to change the world.

The solution or I should rather say the solutions are the “chatbots”.

Chatbots

Chatbot is a service powered by artificial intelligence or a set of pre-programmed rules. The thing that makes it more unique is the presence of human touch. A chatbot speaks the language of humans, not that of machines.

People talking to a chatbot will more often than not feel that they are talking to a person rather than a bot which is a definite upside of this bot.

Additionally, chatbots have the capacity to interact with people on private messaging apps such as skype, Facebook messenger etc. Naturally, digital marketing professionals welcome this idea with open arms.

How are businesses using bots in their campaigns?

Facebook nurtures a belief that chatbots have the potentials of making life easier for their 1.5 billion registered users.

Businesses can use these bots for a number of activities ranging from automated customer support to marketing.

For example, any airline service can implement these bots to make life easier for their customers.

Once a customer books a flight to destination X, the app opens up an automated message thread and sends flight updates, booking confirmations, boarding pass etc. to the customer on the app itself.

The customer will also be able to engage in a direct conversation with the bot if they have any other queries of their own.

Why are chatbots considered the next big thing in business marketing?

• True engagements that aren’t just “clicks”

Traditionally, online advertising was based mainly on clicks like who clicked on an ad or who clicked on a video, etc. Engagement rates were calculated on that.  Now do you think that’s good enough? Do you think all those “clicks” are even relevant to your campaigns? Guess not!

With chatbots, you can be sure of at least one thing, i.e. you will be receiving true and relevant engagements in comparison to the ones from PPC advertising.

• You are going to your customers on your own; NOT the other way around

Traditional marketing was more or less based on the ways of drawing effective and relevant traffic to your target pages so you can convert a big chunk of them to your targeted leads.

In other words, you relied much on your potential customers to actually come to you. But with the implementation of chatbots, this entire process has gone through a sea-change.

• Give your brand identity a life of its own

A brand identity is usually presented to the user in the form of text or image through the use of videos, banner ads, flyers, billboards and so on.

How about you give your brand image a life of its own? It would seem like a “live entity” from the user’s point of view.

• Direct user insights

Through the implementation of chatbots, businesses will be able to get user insights directly from their users. They won’t have to present users with an online form that they will have to fill up individually to get targeted leads from specific pages.

What can you finally expect?

Messaging apps have already become the new buzz and I honestly can’t see this trend change within the next few years.

So it’s expected that most companies will try and adapt themselves to this novel trend. They will strive hard to develop chatbots for their customer support and marketing campaigns.

If they don’t keep up with this trend, they are going to lose the fight with the giants in the business.

So stop procrastinating and get on the chatbot trend as soon as possible. You will be benefited in the long run.