Facebook messenger now on brand sites

 On Tuesday Facebook Announced that its Messenger is rolling out a chat plugin for companies to use Facebook’s messaging service to power the chat features on their own sites, The Customer Chat tool is currently in testing.

Facebook is making this plugin for businesses to match the ID it creates when people interact with a business’s Messenger account with the separate ID it creates when people log in to the business’s app or website using their Facebook account.

Reports say when a person visits a Customer Chat-enabled site, they’ll see a Messenger icon where the normal live chat icon would typically appear. Clicking on the icon will open a Messenger thread on the page. Users will need to be logged in to Facebook Messenger in their browser before they can message the business. From that point on, the experience largely mirrors Messenger. Businesses can send links, photos, and videos as messages and have people respond using quick-reply buttons.

If a business operates multiple apps and sites or owns multiple Facebook Pages, it can match a person across all those places, assuming the person logged in via Facebook to those other apps and sites or contacted those other Pages on Messenger.

When The Messenger unifies these IDs, marketers can take into account people’s interactions across Messenger and their own apps or sites when targeting adverts.

Messenger as a  CRM marketing channel

Any thread started on a Messenger-powered site also exists on Messenger. That means that if someone messages a brand on its site, brands will be able to follow up on that chat within Messenger. And since businesses can set up Customer Chat to let them know on which pages of their site a person started a chat, brands can use these on-site interactions to inform their Messenger conversations and establish more of an ongoing relationship. That could also establish Messenger as a new CRM channel for marketers, one that may replace, email.