Notification Topics
- Matthew Miao
For meta channels (Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp), users have a limit that they can only be contacted within 24 hours of the interaction. Afterwards you are unable to send them any more messages of automations
For this use case, Facebook has introduced notifications to be sent to users after subscribing them to it. These help you continue your automations past the 24 hour interaction limitation.
You can read more about them here:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/messenger-platform/marketing-messages
How to Create Notification Topics Inside UChat
Inside your bot, click on “Content” then “Notification Topic”
Click on “New Topic” to create a new notification topic
Types of Notification Topics
There are two types of notification topics that Facebook allows us to send to the users.
One Time Notifications (OTN) - Can only be sent once
Recurring Notifications - Can be sent on a recurring interval of time
Both of these notification types require the user’s consent and they will have to explicitly subscribe to these notifications before we can send it to them.
One Time Notifications (OTN)
To create an OTN, click on the “New Topic” then select “ONCE” from the type.
Once done, click on Save.
Before we can send this to a user, we first need to subscribe them to it. For subscription,
Create a “Send Message” node, then click on Notification Message. Then select “OTN Request” option.
Select the topic you want to send, add some test and then send it to the user. Once they click on “Notify Me”, you can then subscribe them to a sequence to then send them the OTN whenever the need arise.
Recurring Notifications
Click on “New Topic” and select “RECURRING” option from the frequency tab.
To subscribe the users to a recurring notification, create a Send Message node, then select on Notifications and then select “Daily Notification Topic”
Similarly if they click on “Get Messages” you can subscribe to a sequence that will send them the recurring messages on the interval of your choice.
How to Send Notification Messages
To send notifications (both OTN and recurring) , create a Send Message node, select Notifications and select “Send Notification Message”
Select the topic that you want to send, then once done, the message following the message above should contain the notification message. For example:
The last send message node in this flow is the content you want to send to the users while the middle node is the initiator to let Facebook know that this is a notification.