Amplifying your messaging strategy

Once you've established a messaging strategy and are better serving your community using Messenger, WhatsApp and/or Instagram Direct, consider if it may be time to start reaching even more of your community. Advertising as part of your messaging strategy could help reach new audiences by letting more people find and interact with your messaging experience. This could be on any of our three messaging platforms, including Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram Direct.

The main types of messaging ads

Ads that click to Messenger or WhatsApp

These ads send people to a conversation with your organisation on Messenger or WhatsApp*.

As a government organisation, you could use ads that click to Messenger or WhatsApp to:

• Reach and engage people who are most likely to respond with public service announcements (PSAs) or educational information. For example, you may have shared a video about COVID-19 vaccine safety and now want to make people aware that your organisation is available to answer questions about vaccine safety via Messenger. You could use the Messages objective to reach people who have engaged with your video and are likely to interact with you on Messenger.
• Drive people to your WhatsApp chatbot from ads on Facebook or Instagram. For example, you may have just launched a WhatsApp chatbot to answer questions about a new government-led employment support programme, and may be promoting this on your Facebook Page or Instagram profile. Here, you could use the Traffic objective to send people from ads about this programme directly to your WhatsApp chatbot.
• Register people for government services. For example, you may want people to sign up for social welfare packages and are sharing important information about these packages via a WhatsApp bot. You could use the Conversionsobjective here to target people who have previously engaged with content related to social welfare on your website and send them to your Whatsapp bot.

Note: You will need to install a Facebook pixel on your website to use the Conversions objective. You can also use the Conversions API, a Facebook tool for organisations that enables you to share data for which you have all of the necessary rights and permissions directly from your server.

Learn more about the Conversions API here.

Your advertising experience may also be affected by Apple's iOS 14 changes – read this Newsroom post for more details.

Ads that click to Instagram Direct

Ads that click to Instagram Direct send people from ads into direct conversations with your organisation. Your ad will only run on Instagram, and will be shown to people more likely to chat on Instagram Direct. Here, similar to ads that click to WhatsApp or Messenger, you can use the Messages objective to reach people who are more likely to respond.

Sponsored messages in Messenger

Sponsored messages in Messenger can be used to send information and updates directly to the people your organisation interacts with, within the Messenger app. These can be particularly helpful if you want to send highly tailored messages to people.

For example, if you wanted to re-engage people who had connected with you about vaccine safety on Facebook or Instagram, you could create a sponsored message and use the Messages objective to reach them with information about vaccine availability or eligibility.

Building a messaging ecosystem

Having a messaging ecosystem will enable you to create a campaign that revolves around driving people to your messaging experience (such as a chatbot) and re-engaging people who interact with you.

Here's an example of a messaging ecosystem.

Campaign: The purpose of this campaign is to drive awareness and traffic with ads that click through to Messenger.

Messaging experience: This refers to how you will respond to incoming messages, either with a human employee, automation or a combination of both. If you wanted to address multiple queries quickly and to a large population, you could create an automated messaging experience, such as using a chatbot, to instantly provide accurate information to your community.

Re-engagement: Once someone has engaged with your messaging experience, you could re-engage them with timely updates and reminders with notifications and sponsored messages when appropriate.

Creative considerations

Consider multiple formats and placements across Facebook apps and services to drive people to your messaging experience.

In order to maximise delivery and performance, develop a collection of assets that can run across all available placements. In particular, a mix of both video and static assets will help ensure that you can run across all placements and provide optimal creative performance. See examples below: