ManyChat headquartered in San Francisco provides their chatbot building platform to deploy Facebook messenger chatbots for support and service.
$10
per month
Pinterest for Business
Score 7.5 out of 10
N/A
Pinterest is an ideas and inspiration-oriented social media platform with commerce capabilities built in for businesses. Pinterest aims to bring a passionate, loyal audience who wants to try new things. Pinterest also boasts effective ads relative to other social media platforms, available in a wide variety of formats.
I found that ManyChat is a strong tool when receiving incoming messages, being able to create a tree of potential responses based on options given to the initiator. There is also a huge potential for complex automation (as long as the environment required by Facebook in order to send outgoing messages is maintained).
I guess it's good for house-type consumer goods or food. Not very good for the type of products I sell or anything that might be commercial in nature or B2B. At this point, I like it for backlinks and that's about it. Because of their hyper-restrictive TOS, It really does not have any other value for me.
Honestly, the only thing I don't like about ManyChat is their support. It seems to be almost non existent. However, that concern is negated by having a fantastic user base that helps each other out on Facebook.
The Pinterest interface is an organizational horror show. It is very easy to get lost when moving from one module to another.
They appear to have brutally bad internal communications between departments. After inserting their "tag" onto my site they looked at my prouduct line and decided it violated their TOS. OK, I get that. As I said earlier, a lot of social media companies have an issue with hemp-based products. I deleted the tag and now they keep reminding me that I need to install the tag so they can complete the process to make me a verified merchant. Hey Pinterest, figure it out1 Not that hard!
Their online seminars are a joke. They are nothing more than cheerleading sessions for Pinterest true-believers. If you want to actually learn something about online marketing avoid their seminars.
BTW, Pinterest is not good with criticism of any type. I tried constructive criticism and got whacked from their mailing list. I can;t imagine how they might react to the above comments.
ManyChat is a great tool, provides loads of features, integrations and just saves you a whole load of time once all set up. If you aren't tech-savvy or used to how digital marketing tools work, it can appear complicated. That's how I felt initially 2 years ago, and after watching tutorials online I had a better understanding of it. This is why I rated it a 7, as it's not a tool that you can just play around with and guess how it works. There's definitely a learning curve with it so I recommend doing the free training and watching video tutorials.
There is room for improvement but frankly, we haven't had the need to request for support. Everything is pretty easy to setup and there are very useful video explanation guides and walkthroughs on ManyChat's YouTube channel. The only challenge we have had was to integrate it with Zapier, it's a bit tricky because you need to do a setup workaround first, but nothing too complicated.
I've worked in the past with Chatfuel. However, I decided to switch to ManyChat due to a variety of reasons. Overall, ManyChat offers much more functionality out of the box (e.g., Facebook comments tool), sequence builders are much more intuitive. Also, they provide flexible pay as you go pricing plan, which is perfect for a startup like us.
I really haven't found any other product like Pinterest so I can't make a comparison. The sad thing about Pinterest is it has a lot of potential value for business people and companies and could/should be doing a lot better. Unfortunately, they perpetually get in their own way, over and over and over again.
For the intended application, we experienced a negative ROI due to the inconsistency in the ability to maintain the automation without incoming responses. Since it is a free service that was meant to lead to paid services organically, the inconsistencies prevented the desired outcome.
We did experience a higher conversion rate with basic incoming messages with questions about services or products due to the ability to have pre-created responses and direction immediately supporting the prospect.
