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Why should Newspapers use Messenger?

Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter let publishers reach the masses. However, there is still a need for media and news outlets to connect with their audience, particularly their younger audience, in a more personal way. A solution to this problem is chatting applications like Facebook Messenger. Advantages to the chat ecosystem include huge, untapped audiences; high engagement through push notifications, and unique products like chatbots.

Facebook’s Messenger app isn’t just for chatting with your friends anymore. Facebook’s chat app has now also become a newsreader of sorts. This makes Messenger a very integral resource for news publishers. If you aren’t utilizing Messenger to fully utilize the potential of your news platform, you’re severely missing out.

How can Facebook Messenger help you?

Messenger allows you to reach a significantly larger audience than was possible before (there are currently 1.3 billion Messenger users globally and it is expected to grow to 2.4 billion users by 2021). Messenger also averages around 70-80% open rates and 20% clickthrough rates, which are amongst the highest of any messaging platform. This ensures that published stories on your platform reach their largest potential audience, which in turn will lead to a significantly higher number of subscriptions to your newspage.

How can you utilize Messenger to maximize your news platform’s potential?

Our KiboEngage subproduct has very versatile news integration features for news publishers, so that they can connect their subscribers with the news that is most important and meaningful to them.

As of March, 4 2020, Facebook introduced a new policy regarding their messaging policies. The major change is that you can no longer send subscription broadcast messages outside of a 24 hour session (you can still send broadcasts within 24 hours of a subscriber messaging your page). However pages that have been registered with Facebook’s News Page Index are still given this privilege.

So if your page has been registered with Facebook’s NPI, then you can take advantage of being able to send subscription messages outside of a 24 hour window. This allows news publishers to send daily news updates to subscribers. KiboEngage has features that allow you to easily utilize the NPI permission to the fullest extent.

For more information on how to register for NPI for your newspage, click here: https://facebook.com/business/help/316333835842972

KiboEngage has two exclusive features for news publishers: Rss Integration and News Integration.

RSS Integration

RSS is a standardized format for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites. The main benefit of RSS is that instead of having to go out to each individual website and see if there is any new content, content comes to you in one centralized location. If your newspage has an RSS feed set up, it becomes incredibly easy to push daily news to your messenger subscribers through KiboEngage’s RSS integration.

Setting this up is as easy as filling in the form below:

You can set up a default feed that will be sent to subscribers every day showing the designated number of stories that you have set. For example, if you set up the default feed to show no more than 5 pages, it will pick up the top 5 posts from your webpage’s rss feed, and show them to your subscribers daily on messenger as shown below:

You can also set up additional feeds for other topics. Your subscribers can then choose to subscribe to these additional topics (e.g. sports, tech news, etc.) and they will then receive daily updates on those topics as well.

News Integration

If your page doesn’t have an RSS feed, you can then make use of the News Integration feature. This is similar to RSS integration, however this is a manual process where you will have to update the top stories daily rather than it automatically being fetched from the connected RSS url.

You can define different topics the same way as you would for RSS integration:

The main difference here is that you will no longer be providing an RSS url from where it can automatically fetch the top stories.

Now you will have to manually add the stories for each topic:

 

 

Integrating these features with your platform will hardly take any effort, but they’ll ensure that your messenger subscribers get their daily updates from your news page in a more personalized way. This will push more readers to your newspage, and will result in greater interaction and traffic, which will ultimately drive growth for your platform.

Sign up and get started today: https://kiboengage.cloudkibo.com/

For more information, feel free to contact jawaid@cloudkibo.com.