Using Flow Builder to send Facebook (Meta) Messenger messages

Flow Builder allows you to configure different actions for your Facebook Messenger channel, including rich capabilities like quick reply buttons, generic and media template messages.

How does this step benefit me?

The “Send Facebook Message” step allows you to maximize the customization of your messages to your users. It provides interactive features that enable end-users to select quick-reply options or templates instead of typing their replies to a conversation. In this guide, you’ll learn how to configure the Send Facebook Message step in Flow Builder.

Before getting started

Before beginning, you’ll need

Step 1:Log in to your MessageBird Dashboard and navigate to Flow Builder.

Step 2: Create a new flow or choose an existing flow. If you selected a new flow, please choose a trigger that applies to you and an available conversational channel.

Step 3: Add a step Send Facebook Message.

Step components

The components of this step are as follows:

Send settings

To configure how the message will be sent: either as a reply back of current conversion, from/to a different channel, or in a specific conversation modify the option in the Send settings

Message Settings

The section allows you to configure the message type selecting from “text”, “media”, “quick replies”, or “template”. Here is where the interactive features can be configured.

The Quick replies section allows you to configure the quick replies message withup to 12 buttons that contain a title and an optional image. The image will be cropped to 24x24 px by Facebook.

This is an example of how quick replies look in Facebook Messenger:

The Template section allows you to configure the template message types. Currently, we support media and generic templates:

The media template allows you to send images, GIFs, and video as a structured message with an optional button. Example:
The generic template is a structured message that includes a title, subtitle, image, and up to 3 buttons. You can build a carousel with up to 10 generic templates, to show a set of items, as on example:

Each template button has an optional “payload” field that’s connected to the button, you can use this to specify a defined action for the user on selecting the button. It could be one of the following:

URL - typically used to redirect the end-user to your website.
Phone number - to contact your business over the phone.
Leave it empty - this will ensure the selected option goes back as a message to the business in this case Flow Builder

Response settings

Here, you can automatically configure the branching of the interactive messages such as the quick reply buttons and buttons from templates. At the same time, you could also configure the wait for response section whereby the step would wait for an end-user to respond to it for ‘x’ time. If there is no response within that time, the user would move to the next step in the flow automatically. You could also configure a separate expired case from the same section whereby you can configure what should happen if the user doesn’t respond within ‘x’ time.

The branches for quick replies and template messages slightly differ.

For quick replies, the branches are intuitive: for each button title, a new branch is specified. Here is an example of branching for quick replies buttons with text: “Mario”, “King Boo”, and “Goomba”.
For generic templates, there can be a scenario where the same button-text can be configured for different items, for example, “Buy this!” for each T-shirt you specify in the carousel. In this case, an additional template number is shown, so you can easily distinguish and handle the response according to your business logic.

Advanced settings

Available advanced settings are:

Status reports enablement: sending reports on the status of the message sent it the step via a GET request to a URL provided
TrackID enablement: when filled out, the trackID will be sent as a parameter in the messages, allowing you to track insights such as read, delivered, failed, or rejected using the reporting API

Step 4: Configure the message as per your choice in the message settings section of the Send Facebook Message step.

Shared below is an example message that’s configured using a quick repliesmessagewith response settings where branching is enabled. Step 5: Build out your flow with the combination of several such Send Facebook Message steps as per your use case and don’t forget to Save and Publish the Flow. Here is an example of what it would look like for your end-user.