You have set it up before. It worked fine.
You may have set up multiple versions and they all were great.
And then one, or two or three just don’t act like the others.
You have poured over them. Studying them. Researching. Googling.
And yet…the ManyChat bot won’t fire.
THE ANSWER: Remove the emoji from the first position in the FB post description.
This happened to me. I had built multiple successful comment to message bots for photo FB posts and video.
All worked great.
And then I built several in a row that absolutely wouldn’t fire.
I asked everyone I knew.
I analyzed it for hours.
I almost quit.
And then I saw a pattern. All the non-working posts were on Quirky Momma which is pretty heavily emoji-laden :). I mean, who doesn’t love a good emoji storm?
I had been in the habit of adding a heart on either side of the headline for emphasis.
As soon as I removed that first heart, and re-tried the bot…it worked.
{insert angel choir}
I mentioned it to a few friends who were also creating messenger bots with ManyChat and they noticed that it was the same for them.
The fun part came next…
I went to Conversations in Austin. It was the first ManyChat conference filled with one thousand people. About 60% of those were doing some sort of FB ad agency or Messenger Marketing agency.
While I had been using the comment-to-message feature on live videos for as long as it was available, I hadn’t been fully using ManyChat until a few months prior.
It was an intimidating room filled with people who knew a lot more about bots than me.
I was there to soak up the knowledge.
My dear friend, Stephanie (total bot expert – check out her amazing course on getting the most out messenger marketing (affiliate)} who literally knew 33% of the people in that very large room started introducing me around. We ended up sitting with some of her friends on the very front row.
I was sitting next to Bill Herloskii who runs an agency.
In one of the breaks I was asking him how he was using ManyChat for clients. He told me that he had built multiple successful bots for restaurants and other businesses with great results…
…until about a month ago when they stopped working. It was incredibly frustrating. He had spent days with ManyChat support, but his comment-to-message just wouldn’t work.
I know what the problem is.
He looked at me suspiciously. He related all the things he had tried. He had even gone as far as to re-install FB.
I know how to fix it.
He listened.
Remove the emoji in the first position of the description.
He related that he doesn’t really use emojis very often. He thanked me politely and we started chatting about something else.
During the next talk, he opened up the FB posts that were causing him problems. He turned to me excitedly…THEY ALL HAVE EMOJIS!!!
He edited them and tested the comment-to-message bot.
It worked.
Bill is awesome. Within 24 hours, he had introduced me to about a million people as the person who saved his business.
Oh, and we were live in the 57K ManyChat community to explain the solution. If you are a member, you can see that video here.
Several other people thanked me for the information. It is a more common issue than I ever expected.
And I learned to get over my fear of being the person in the room that knows the least. There is power in knowing just a little bit…you look at things differently because you don’t fully understand what it SHOULD be.
You are limited to what you know. And sometimes that is just the right amount.
