Welcome to episode 360 of Hit the Mic with The Stacey Harris.
All right guys, episode 360, first episode of August 2017. It's August 1st today and I'm like, "Dude, where is the year going?" Oh, it's killing me. But we've got some cool, cool stuff to talk about today. I want to talk about three things I want you to know right now when it comes to your online marketing, when it comes to your social media time, all three things are social media related today. We've got two Facebook things and a LinkedIn update, which I'm very excited about so let's jump right in.
Okay, so real talk, Facebook bots are amazing. I'm absolutely obsessed. I think they're really, really cool. I think they're going to be a really powerful way for us to connect in a new way with our community and they're going to be a really powerful way to serve our community on Facebook in a different way. However, like all new gadgets and gizmos and fun things, there are some people using it in some really screwy ways. There's some people using it in some really, really awesome ways. I want to make sure you are one of those awesome people using it in a really cool way to connect.
I actually first really dove into bot stuff and how it worked and the structure back in March when I attended a conference that Digital Marketer puts on called Traffic and Conversion. The CEO of the Digital Marketer who's a guy by the name of Ryan Deiss, for those of you who are not familiar with Digital Marketer, I'm obsessed. Ryan made a really good comment and I really, I run all of my bot related conversations through this filter, which is that bots allow you to automate the start of conversations. Not conversations completely, not sales, but the start of conversations.
The bot is really allowing us to get in front of someone and say, "Hey, can I help you?" "Hey, what can I support you with?" "Hey, where can I direct you?" "Hey, what do you need?" Now automating the need for me to never, ever respond to messages again. I think that's a really important filter when you're looking at how are you going to use your bot for good and not for evil. That's what I really encourage you to think about when you're setting up your bots. If you want to learn more about bots we're talking all about bots in The Mic Backstage this month. In fact, just today a brand new training went live with some cool Facebook bot options.
We talk about how to use Facebook bot right inside of Facebook. There are some bot features right in Facebook and I do suggest turning those on, looking at those, setting those up. If for no other reason to say, "Hey, I got your message, I'll be back soon or someone on our team is going to respond quickly." You don't even have to offer them up a resource right there but just saying, "Hey, you're heard. Hey, we got this, we'll be right back," or, "Hey, we only answer messages between such and such and such and such, we'll get back to you then." Again, we're just making sure that these people feel heard. We're automating the start of a conversation, we're not automating the conversation.
Those are really low hanging fruit bot stuff to set up that Facebook is actually doing natively and that's killer. Also in the training we're talking about some more advanced stuff using the tool I use for my chat bot, which is Many Chat.
