Solid Chat: answering Facebook Page chats from your phone
Our own app for Facebook Page admins: every Page's Messenger chats in one place, with quick replies, a chatbot for when you're away, and broadcasts. Our first chat app, and our first time building on Facebook.
We have a few Facebook Pages for our own apps, Sophie Lens, Guess That Song and Facemoji, and people message them. Last April at F8, Facebook opened Messenger to bots, and businesses can now plug their own apps into their Page’s chats. So we built Solid Chat, an app for answering the Messenger chats of all your Facebook Pages from your phone, with a chatbot to help out. The store versions are ready.
How it works
You sign in with Facebook and add the Pages you manage. Each Page gets its own list of chats, with a score for how satisfied people were, taken from the rating they give at the end of a chat. Quick replies drop in the customer’s first name, so a follow-up or your opening hours goes out with one tap. When you need to, you can end the chat or opt the person out.
Each Page also has a Chatbot Assistant you can switch on. It answers by keyword when nobody’s around, and otherwise tells people you’ll get back to them soon. And you can broadcast to everyone who opted in to hear from the Page, as plain text or with a title, a link and an image, and preview it the way it’ll look in Messenger.
We tried it on our own Pages first. Since January it’s been running in TestFlight against the Nerd Attack Page and our app Pages, each on a trial or a subscription of its own.
The site went up in December, solidchat.co, and in January we put the plans on it… a free 30-day trial with no credit card, then $5.99 a page a month, or $4.99 a page if you pay for the year. Last month we opened the beta, so for now every button on the site says join the beta.
Facebook’s rules
It’s our first chat app and our first time building on Facebook’s platform, and Facebook’s side of it has been a pain. Every permission an app asks for, like managing someone’s Pages, goes through Facebook’s review. The messaging rules are strict too. Since last August, a Page has 24 hours to reply to someone who messages it, plus one more message after that. Anything later counts as a subscription message, which needs its own permission and can’t be promotional. So a broadcast to the people who opted in has to stay inside those lines.
Update, April 2017: there’s a web version now as well, so you can answer from a desktop. Same chats, quick replies and broadcasts, in the browser, and you can pay for the subscription there too.