Live Transcript

Intro

Hi, everyone, and welcome to what you need to know weekly with me, Sophie Nicole Casey.

So I’m going live with this news this week, a day early because as you may or may not know, but the changes coming into ManyChat and Facebook, which actually come into effect tomorrow. So I thought if I did the news tomorrow is going to be a little bit too late for some of you.

And so I don’t know if you saw but about three weeks ago, I actually did another news recording, which was about this as well, but it was only affecting the Facebook ads at that time.

And on Facebook Ads Official Guidance, they said, like, these are the changes, we’re hopefully going to basically make some more changes in the next few weeks…and the way I read that was we’re going to make some changes for the better, like, we’re going to iron out these creases, and you’re not going to be affected as much.

But it went the other way. So as of tomorrow, there are even more changes, which are likely to majorly affect everyone.

So what I’m going to do in this live, is I’m going to go over all of this and I’m going to try and break down all of the changes into kind of understandable steps.

And then with each one, and I’ll give you the recommendations that are official like official, ManyChats, recommendations, but also some of my own going in there as well.

I’ll be doing a Q&A at the end if anyone’s got any questions, but otherwise, I will just get straight into it.

Who Does it Affect?

So same as my live a few weeks ago, iit affects everyone in Europe. So all 27 European Union countries, plus Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein, I still don’t know how to say that one, and the United Kingdom.

And so who it affects within these places are any businesses who are based there. And the way they work that out is who is the like owner of the business, where your base. So even if you’re paying tax in a different country, but you are based in the UK, it will still affect you, because Facebook is going to pull the info from your profile.

So the next group of people it affects is if you’ve got admins of your Facebook page, not ManyChat accounts, but Facebook pages who are based in those places, it will also affect you.

And finally, if you’ve got any subscribers who are based in those places, then it also will affect you.

So, for example, if you’re US-based and all of your audience is based in the US, but you have someone who helps manage your page, and they’re based in the UK, this is going to affect you.

So in terms of this, there’s only one thing you can really do, which is remove any page admins who are based, you know, in one of these places that are affected, if that’s the only thing that’s making you affected.

So obviously, it’s not going to be so easy for everyone, if you’ve got someone who’s been working for you for like 10 years, and all of a sudden, they’re the only reason you can’t do things normally in the US or whatever, you know, it’s a bit of a ballache but that is basically the only thing you can do.

You can think about things like changing people from admin to like editor or something, but that’s not necessarily going to help, Facebook are going to look through it, or people can change the location or use like in a VPN to appear to be in a different country.

But I think the fact is, you just need to go with it. Because Facebook’s gonna find out and it’s going to punish you, you’ll probably get shut down for trying to go against the rules, or whatever.

So that’s who it affects.

Now everything that follows here just applies to people within that basically. So first of all, I’m going to go over them and there’s a few things, which are gonna stop working completely.

What’s going to stop working entirely

Now the first one is a one-time notification, also known as OTN. So if you’ve ever run a bot, or created a bot, or used someone else’s bot, and they say, “hey, in order for me to be able to contact you later about this specific subject, I need you to click the notify me button below…”, that is called an OTN and what it does is it gives the bot owner a chance to contact someone outside of the 24-hour window.

Whereas normally after 24 hours of interaction from that person, we cannot contact them again at all, you know, at all, finished.

So and yeah also you cannot create custom audiences of your subscribers either. So, basically you would in Facebook ads create a custom audience. So people who have been in your bot, um, I went over this one on the live a few weeks ago. But just to add to that…

So basically for both of these things, what you need to do is figure out a different way to go around it.

So what you should be doing is basically collecting email addresses of those people instead. And then with those email addresses, you can create a list to import into Facebook ads. So it’s your email address you’re using and not your subscriber list.

And then in terms of the OTN, the one-time notifications, what you need to be doing is leveraging other channels. So think about using email marketing or SMS, which just means text messaging.

And then once you do rather than saying, click here to allow me to contact you later, you just say, give me your email address, and then I will send you a notification, later on, to tell you when this is going to happen.

So that’s our only option at the moment. And this is very early, there are so changes being made constantly, things changed today, yesterday, the day before, it’s all changing all the time.

And disclaimer, everything in this live news is true and valid as far as I know, up to this point in time, there haven’t been any more updates since I checked about a minute before I went live.

Okay, so next on my list is, you will no longer be able to create automations using a Facebook ad. So what we normally do when we’re running Facebook ads is we say, click here to send a message.

And then what happens is when they click Send Message, it doesn’t just open a blank message, it normally opens up a flow and automates a sequence, you know, something that’s set up to actually start a conversation or send a flow to push someone down your funnel.

So basically, you cannot do that anymore. And you can only when people click messenger, it will only open on the welcome message or the Get Started screen depending on if they’ve interacted with your bot before.

So what you need to do here the recommendations are, you can use keywords to your advantage. So you can, for example, in your ads, you can say “click the Send Message button, and then type challenge” or freebie or whatever it is. And then what you need to do is set up a keyword so that when they type in that word, it will automatically trigger the correct flow.

So the next thing is there will no longer be subscriber or audience profile information. So this includes first and last name, profile picture, the locale of the user on Facebook, timezone, and gender.

So where before we take it for granted, but as soon as people go into your bot, they’ve already given Facebook that permission to share their name, location, email address, potentially, but gender, everything like that.

And that actually goes into ManyChat automatically.

Now what’s going to happen from tomorrow is that it disappears. So we will no longer have a first name.

So in all of your flows, where you’ve said, “Hey, first name”, or “what do you think about that first name”, that’s not going to happen anymore, because you won’t have their names.

So there’s one thing to do and School of Bots has actually created a flow which you can use with about three clicks, you can save all of your existing ManyChat data, like the Facebook data, into your ManyChat that Facebook can’t take away.

So what I’m going to do at the end of this live is put into the comments, a link for you to go and import that flow for free. I’m not stealing it from anyone, it’s from the School of Bots they made it, and it is also very easy to replicate. But I didn’t have time. So I’m just giving them this one.

And that will basically save your info and Facebook won’t take that away.

If you don’t do this, the chances are tomorrow, all of your European subscribers will no longer have a face, they won’t have a name. Now, this is something that is still actually in discussion.

So ManyChat did announce that they’re trying to work on actually still being able to pull in this information for us or allow us to keep it. It’s not confirmed yet. And we won’t know until tomorrow.

But if you want to be absolutely sure and safe, that you’re not going to lose all of your subscriber info, then you need to do this now basically, otherwise, you are risking losing your entire audience of subscribers, or people who you have built up over however long you’ve been, you know, running your bot.

So the next one is your profile in live chat. So when you’re using live chat, there’s a setup so that the user at the other end can see who’s talking to them. So say you’ve got four people who manage your ManyChat, and whoever speaks to them on the live chat, they will be able to see which agent is speaking to them.

Now that will no longer show up. So they’re just gonna see like nobody. And so it’s not a very personal experience. So the recommendation in this situation is when you start a live chat with anyone, introduce yourself and say, “Hi, you’re talking to the real Sophie, how can I help you today?”, and it just helps them to understand who they’re speaking to.

Because obviously when a bot’s set up, there’s no pretending to be a person. When you set up your bot, you need to make it clear that they’re talking to it, but it goes against regulations to pretend your bot is a real person. So when you do say that you’re talking to this person, then it should mean something to them.

Okay, so the next one is web plugins.

So the ‘send to messenger’ and the checkbox plugin. And so what this basically means is when when you’ve set up your ManyChat, you’ve got different ways people can opt-in, and one of them, one of them is to put an overlay on your website.

So when they go on a certain page, an overlay like a thing will go across the screen like that. And it’ll prompt them to click send some message to subscribe to your ManyChat.

Another one is like when they’re checking out or something. You know, if they’re in your shop and they’re buying something, they can tick the checkbox. And then that will also add them to ManyChat as well.

So these are now disappearing, the way it is at the moment is they’re just going to break they’re going to be gone. But if you use ManyChat and not any different software, ManyChat have actually worked out a solution.

So that now is not going to be broken. And I can’t vouch for if you’re using different software, but now it will work as a normal messenger button. But again, it’s not going to go into any special flow or anything like that, it’s just going to go to the main home screen.

So if you’re promoting something, just like I said, in the ads about using the ads, you need to give instructions for them to type a certain keyword or you can add something to your main menu so that, for example, they’ll see like, welcome to my bot, blah, blah services contact me, if you just clicked through from my website, click here, or it has to be shorter than that, but you know, something like that, so they know where to go.

Because normally, they would go to a specific flow, especially for them. And it’d be a very streamlined, nice kind of user experience. But now that’s all going away, basically.

So the next one is sending and receiving media attachments, apart from images.

So you will no longer be able to be allowed to send anything other than images, text and images or texts and images.

So if you’re sending files, PDFs, videos, anything like that, it’s just not going to work, it’s going to just show as broken, basically.

And so this is another one that ManyChat have fixed, I don’t know if any other bot programs have done it as well, but now ManyChat will just auto-generate a link, which shows that they can click and download.

But if they try and send you any other files, they will just get an error or and you will get an error and they can’t send you anything basically.

So if you don’t want to use this way around another way around it is you can use Google Drive or Dropbox and you can just paste a link to whatever files you want to share that. And then you can be sure that they’re going to be able to access it fine, it’s not going to break on anything.

And just to add to that one, GIF is apparently classed as an image in this sense. So you can still send GIFs, which is a nice touch.

And the next thing is the default and dynamic menus.

So basically, when you look in someone’s chat on your phone, you can see the little hamburger menu, the menu with three lines.

Now that’s no longer going to show at all. So when they’re on your bot when they’re talking to you or talking to your bot going through it, if they get lost if they get to a dead end.

Normally before, they could just press the hamburger menu, and then straight away, they would get the options of you know, go home, contact me or whatever. Now this is not going to display anymore at all.

So what you need to do is make sure you’ve got a default reply set up. So basically, if they type in anything that your bot doesn’t understand, it automatically replies with a message and says, you know, “Hey, sorry, I didn’t understand that. Do you want to speak to a human? Click here to speak to a human or Click here to see the main menu.”

Now this is the other thing, menus will no longer render, they will no longer work on any device other than Android or iOS. So if you’ve got any users who might be using Facebook on a laptop, who might be using the messenger application on Mac, or whatever else that people can use, that’s not Android or iOS, buttons will not work.

So you have to be using quick replies for everything. Now again, the thing about quick replies is when someone selects one of them, the other options will disappear. Whereas with menus, if people select one of the options, and then they want to go back, they can scroll up. And then they can just select a different menu option, a different menu item.

But again, this is with quick replies. And that’s no longer the case. So all of these little things just add up to like a not very good user experience for someone that’s in there.

Another thing that’s not going to be working is the typing indicator. So you know, you can add a delay to say like three seconds typing, so it looks like your bots typing something out.

Or if you’re on chat, a real live chat agent and you’re typing, they would normally see that you’re typing. Now this is no longer going to work at all. It’s just going to be blank, and I’ve got no recommendation for that whatsoever. Maybe just type quickly. There’s a really lame recommendation but what else can we do?

And then the last thing that’s going to completely stop working is the warning and block messages.

So normally when you go into your ManyChat account, you’ll see a big yellow banner saying you’ve done this wrong, you’ve broken these rules. Well, if you break rules, you will but these are no longer going to show in ManyChat because Facebook is not sending that information to ManyChat.

So if you want to get that information, what you need to do is go over to your page into your Page Settings. And I can’t remember what it’s called, I should have checked that earlier.

But you will see it anyway, you’ll see it in your like in your quality inbox or your support inbox, I think it might be a support inbox or your quality inbox, I can’t remember but just keep checking the page regularly. And then if you’re breaking any rules you’ll find out there but ManyChat is no longer able to help us with that, unfortunately.

Things which will be semi-functional

So the next list of things are things that are going to carry on working semi.

So they might work, they might not, I already covered a couple of them, because I just carried on talking, it’s what I do.

And so sending and receiving messages with text images. So like I mentioned before, text, image, and both are okay, but nothing else, as a review.

As I previously mentioned, nothing else will be working, just showing us like links if you’re using ManyChat, or you should create your own Google or Dropbox links to send those.

So messages with buttons, are now only going to work on mobile, as I said, so Android, or iOS. And so the web client, desktop app or chat plugin, none of those will work.

And you will no longer be able to trigger any automations with buttons. So like no matter where they are. So you cannot start a flow by then clicking on a button. So like I said earlier, you just need to change all of your buttons in your bot, all of them, to quick replies. And then you can send a quick reply to go to a different message.

And so next on their, so growth automations apparently accept the comments growth tool.

So all of the ways you can currently create links to grow your ManyChat.

So basically, when you create a link that sits on a button that opens the flow, like when you’ve got a five-day challenge, and on the thank you page, you’ve got a link to sign up to the bot for notifications, these will no longer work.

So say you’ve got that, you know, you’ve got that button linked up. So normally, when they click it, it will open the five-day challenge flow and say, “Hey, thanks for signing up to my five day challenge. Now this is what’s going to happen ra-di-ra”

Well, that won’t happen anymore, it’s just going to open up to the main menu, and they’re going to have to know where to go.

So again, like I said before, so you need to either tell them on your landing page, click this and then type, for example, challenge or have something on the welcome message that they can see instantly.

So they can click into that, they will just be tricky on that one, if you’ve got a lot of menu items, and then they kind of forget why they were going there. And then they’re not sure which one to click on.

So you just need to make sure you make that really, really clear for them when they do that. So just to add to that, this one relates to the location of your page, not your subscriber. So if you’ve got a subscriber who is, you know, in the US, they’re still going to get the EU rules if you are in the EU, basically.

And so the next one is customer chat plugin.

So live customer chat, and guest mode.

So this will still function normally, but you still won’t be able to use any buttons.

And if someone starts a chat with you, as a guest, in the current version as we know it, people can then go on to connect their Facebook account and login. Now they will no longer be able to do this. Which kind of is a shame, but kind of isn’t because Facebook is also taking away the ability to see these people. So they’re going to be anonymous anyway. So everyone’s going to be a guest regardless.

So I don’t know, it depends on what ManyChat are doing. If they make an announcement tomorrow, that they’re finding a way to let us get this information through. That’d be brilliant. But otherwise, just expect to lose the ability to, you know, to get to see who you’re talking to basically.

Things that are functioning as normal

And then finally, these are the things with no limitations.

So I’ve said it a couple of times already, you’ve got your quick replies, and these are going to be your new best friend.

Basically, there are two ways you can do quick replies, you can do the normal one, which is just quick replies, or you can do user input, and then choose multi-choice, which means nothing else happens until they’ve answered that question.

And then what you can do is set like a reminder so that in 22 hours, 23 hours, whatever, if they haven’t answered your question, you can just send them a reminder. Whereas if you use normal quick replies, you’ve got no way of sort of nurturing them or reminding them anything like that.

So think about how you’re going to do that. If you use the user input one, it’s a little bit more complicated because you need to set up rules and conditions on what the answer is about to move them into a flow but I’m not going to go into that I’m trying to keep it simple so just use quick replies and then link up the quick reply to the message that your old menu button would have gone to and that should be fine.

So message tags are still going to function normally note we are talking about message tags, not people tags.

So you know you’ve got a confirmed event update, other, all of that is staying the same.

And your welcome message and conversation starters are all the same, just obviously be careful that you’re not using buttons in them.

Comments growth tool, well, the comments growth tool will still be available after December 16. So the comments grow tool is the one where you get people to subscribe based on them commenting on a post on Facebook, it’s a little bit more complicated, but that is apparently still going to be workin, but, the other restrictions will still apply. So, no buttons, no videos, all that kind of stuff.

So keyword automation will still work as normal. So keyword automation and quick replies, they’re your two best friends really, if you use both of them together, then you should hopefully work out a system that’s going to work for them.

And then finally, you’ve got your m.me links, which is your shortened ManyChat links. So they will still technically work, but they’re not going to deliver the flow that you want them to.

So all of your growth tool URLs that you’ve created, are just going to go straight to the welcome message or the Get Started screen.

So I know I’ve said this all again, I’m just saying it again because I want it to be, sort of strong.

So everything you do now when you send people to your bot is always going to go to the welcome screen or the Get Started screen. And that’s not going to trigger a special automation that you want to work basically.

So just make sure you make absolutely crystal clear to your user, what they need to do, what button Do I need to clip or what keyword they need to type that will then trigger the correct automation that you wanted them to basically, and then it can still work as you want it to.

So that is all the changes that I know of at this moment. Who knows there might be more tomorrow might have good news, or bad news tomorrow. And so I’ve just got some overall recommendations here for you.

Overall recommendations for dealing with EU Privacy Changes

So first of all, start leveraging email and SMS.

So email and text are your friends did you know I didn’t know this, but 3.9 billion people still use email daily compared to 3.5 million using social media. That is a big number. So use email. The only problem with email obviously, is because they can respond in live time and get live responses like you can have ManyChat.

You need to pick your battles, you need to see what’s important to you need to do what you can do, maybe if before you sent a reminder out on ManyChat, saying I’m going live in 15 minutes, maybe you need to change that to two hours on email, because people don’t check their email as frequently as they do there.

Or you need to work out SMS.

And it’s not free, you have to pay for every text message. But You’re damn right sure someone’s gonna pick it up, they’re gonna see your message, so that’s one to think of.

Some locations that don’t work very well with SMS like with text, apparently, like with ManyChat that don’t work, but they have got a workaround.

Or you can just look into different text software, you don’t have to use ManyChat, obviously.

So think about your welcome message, your conversation starters. And just make sure you’ve got them like really, really crystal clear. So people know where they need to go next, just taking into consideration that wherever they click from, they’re not going to automatically go into whatever flow you want them to go into.

And after that is really think about your keyword strategy. So you need to be adding a lot more keywords, basically think about things that people will say a lot.

Add for example the menu as a keyword, which will send them a flow with your main menu in it.

And what you should just do is keep watching, look at the words people type and just keep adding keywords as much as you can as you go, so that as much is automated as possible.

Because without that menu, that hamburger menu that’s no longer going to show, they’re just going to get lost, you know. So if you’ve not got the menu that if you’ve not set up your default reply so that if the bot doesn’t understand what they’re telling it, it says “I don’t understand, you click here to speak to a person or click here to go to the menu”.

If you don’t have them set up, then someone’s just going to get to a dead-end, they’re going to go round in loops like rah, help me and there’s gonna be no one left to help them. So just make sure you’ve thought of all these kinds of possibilities of where they can go wrong, test it out, send it to your friends to test out. And just go from there, really.

How ManyChat is helping the transition

So I’ve probably mentioned these already on this live. But just to reiterate, there are some things that ManyChat are doing to make our lives easier. And they’re either still in progress, or they’ve already been done, but they should all be done by tomorrow.

So they’re creating a new condition for EU versus non-EU. So what you can actually do is at the beginning of all your flows, and you could add a condition so that says if they’re in the EU, go here, if they’re not an EU go here, and then the people who are not in the EU, (just to say this only works if you are not in the EU, if you’re in the EU, you have to do all that stuff. Sorry.)

But if you’re not in the EU and you’ve got subscribers in the EU, then if you’ve got once you’ve got that condition, then you can send the EU subscribers the new sort of boring flow, whatever, and you can send your non-EU subscribers the same flow you always do. And nothing has to change for you. So we’re just waiting on news for that to be ready, but it should be ready by tomorrow.

And the next one is the fallback for the Send to Messenger and check box. Yes. So if you’re not using ManyChat, then any buttons on your website related to that are going to break basically, they’re just not going to work anymore. But if you use ManyChat, they’re going to ManyChat and are working on a workaround that is going to convert those.

So you don’t get broken links, but you just get sent a message button instead. And again, they’re just going to go to your homepage, they’re not going to go to, you know, whatever flow you wanted them to go to originally. So it’s not gonna break completely, but we’re not going to go where you want either.

So just like I said, already, just add instructions in there, tell him to type whatever keywords you want, or tell them to click whatever button in the menu, however you do, it is up to you.

And then finally, I mentioned this already, but to reiterate, the media attachments that you will no longer be able to send ManyChat will convert them automatically into links that people can click, and it’s gonna open the attachment.

So again, if you prefer if you use Dropbox and Google Drive, then just use stuff like that, if you want, it might make it easier. And then it will always be the same link, and you can update it and so on. So it’s up to you.

So that was a lot. I’m just gonna head over and see if I’ve got any comments at all.

Okay, so it doesn’t look like I’ve got any questions at this moment, which is great.

So the next steps, what I’m going to do is I’m going to put in the comments below, a link to a flow, the one I told you about by the School of Bots, which you can import into your ManyChat.

And all you have to do is publish it, go to broadcasts, click Select flow from broadcasts, click next and click Send Now.

That’s not going to send anything out to your users, all it’s going to do is save all of that info into ManyChat info into your custom user fields. So basically, tomorrow, if Facebook manages to take away all of your subscriber info from the system fields, then you’ve still got it saved in your own custom user fields.

Do that now! Do that now! Now! Now, let me know if you have any questions.

And the next thing is I have actually created a checklist of everything that I’ve gone through on this live.

So if you want a checklist, I’ve put a description of everything in there. I’ve added screenshots of what it looks like, of what you need to do.

And so if you want that checklist, and I’ve put it on my bots, I’ve made my bot compliant with all of these new rules. So you can have a look at how it looks.

So no menus, all of that stuff. So you can have a play around with it, have a look, get some inspiration, I’ll put my bot link in the comments below.

And then you can go and get the free checklist from there if you want to. And if you want to book a call with me, if you want to speak about getting your bot fixed for you, then I’d love to help you just again, go to the bot.

And what I’ve done is I’ve put an EU regulations thing at the top of the menu, just click on that and it’ll go through you can either arrange a call with me or you can take the free checklist totally up to you. And also you can just type the words “Fix my Bot” into my bots, and it will start that same automation.

So that is everything I wanted to say today. And I feel like I’ve absolutely run through that. But let me know, don’t hesitate to ask any questions.

And any ideas if you’ve got any great ideas of what you can do to work around this, I want to hear about it.

But otherwise, that’s it for me, I will actually I’ll post a link to the one a few weeks ago with all the Facebook-specific stuff that relates to these same changes. Because we’re running Facebook ads, I did a whole other live on that. So that was before I knew this stuff was going to happen as well.

And yeah, so that does remind me I’ve got some other small bits of news this week, which I’m just going to run through very quickly.

Instagram News

So, first of all Instagram has now released shopping in reels. So you can take your products and add branded content tags so people can now click View products. And while they are watching your reel, and so basically they’re going head to head with TikTok so now Instagram users can shop from videos in feeds, store, live igtv. And with this latest launch reels.

Whatsapp News

And the other one is WhatsApp have now added an Add to Cart button which is great. The only thing is they still can’t work out how to do payments. So you can’t take any payments. You can’t send any payments. You have to work that out yourself. But people can add to cart so it’s a step closer to that.

If you’re based in Brazil or India you do have payment options but that’s just them.

So that was the tiny bit of news that I forgot to mention earlier. And so yeah, that’s it from me as I said let me know if you’ve got any questions, and don’t forget to hit subscribe, follow like notify all of that kind of stuff if you found some value from this if you want to hear more of it…

…and give me hashtag replay if you’re watching on replay.

Thanks so much and take care!

Links

HOW TO SAVE YOUR SUBSCRIBER INFO: This is the flow by School of Bots which will save all of your subscriber info to ManyChat:

FREE CHECKLIST OR BOOK A CALL WITH ME IF YOU WANT HELP – choose “EU Privacy Changes” in the menu, or type “Fix my bot” into a message:

Link to previous video surrounding Facebook Ads and EU Privacy Changes