Edel Horgan, Asia-Pacific agency development lead at Facebook, told The Nation recently that nowadays there were many brands using the platform’s Messenger app to drive sales and communicate with their clients.

“This is a huge opportunity for small and medium-sized business. Currently, there were are about 60 million SME businesses active on Facebook globally. The Messenger bot is a way for them to scale this conversation because they couldcan have one-on-one conversations to reduce cost as athe costs of their business, particularly in customer-service teams,” she said.

A lot of brands are using Facebook Messenger bots for customer service. Dutch airline KLM sends its customers flight tickets via the bot when they make a reservation. Meanwhile, lots of retail business are also using the bots to send shopping lists and product catalogues.

Horgan suggested that Thai SMEs and relevant business could follow suit.

Another highlight is Facebook Live, which is becoming increasingly popular among brands and advertisers.

“Since Facebook Live’s launch last December, Facebook Live has really gained interaction. What we have seen in terms of Facebook Live is that people actually spend 10 times more time on Facebook Live versus normal videos,” she said.

She admitted that her company was experimenting with Facebook Live but there had not been any monetisation yet.

“During this time, Facebook wants to understand how people like it or react [to] it before coming up with monetisation for the brand,” she explained.

But at this stage, Facebook Live is able to allow users to experience brands that they do not have the opportunity to see.

“For example, if you were a brand and you sponsored the an event which invited some VIP guests to participate in this event, brands might use Facebook Live to allow more targeted audiences to see what the brand is up to while having the launch of the product,” she said.

Facebook has said it is shifting from text to visual. According to the company’s data, text data on Facebook last year reduced by 10 per cent while photos posted on this platform increased by 31 per cent.

According global telecom-technology company Cisco, 80 per cent of all content on the Internet will be video by 2019.