How can businesses make best use of Facebook's upcoming products and features?

Facebook’s annual F8 conference provided an opportunity to hear the grand plans that Facebook has to achieve its mission of “Giving everyone the power to share anything with anyone” with innovative technology, newer product features and ways to monetize from existing ecosystem. Among other things, Facebook’s uber plan includes satellites, solar planes and drones to have everyone on internet as well. The overall aim is obviously to reach out to more and more people on Earth and have the existing ones spend more and more time on Facebook.

The announcements are all overall the web; below is my take on how businesses, small and large, can make most out of these features –

1. Opening FB Messenger APIs so that developers can create their own chat bots -> The 900 million users strong Facebook Messenger will now have open APIs that businesses can use to write their own implementation. At a high level, businesses will be able to interpret what user typed in and then accordingly respond back including showing specific text, images and videos. For a business, this allows to have the entire e-commerce run through bots. Instead of having a separate app, businesses can use Messenger to send customized details to its customers. As Mark showed in his keynote, a flower company could send a catalog of all flower bouquets to a customer along with prices, photos and delivery time via Messenger. The user could then decide and type his selection in the bot. Knowing the user beforehand, the company could automatically debit his card and deliver to his previously saved address. For a blog, news or related company, asTechCrunch integration shows, one can selectively send top news, customized news, trending news to a user. With some NLP techniques at business’s end, one can use Messenger to become a generic help hub and/or a full-fledged service provider.
2. The new Surround360 camera and open camera APIs -> Facebook launched 360 videos last September and at F8 announced a new camera (with 17 evenly spaced lenses) that allows making it easier to shoot and stitch a 360 video. With these videos offering a kind of full-fledged reality, businesses can display their product more creatively. So, Incredible India could show forts in Delhi with a 360 degree view, Mercedes could similarly show in and out of their new model and an airline could show their business class experience (see Lufthansa’s in-flight experience in this 360 video).
3. Live feed and video API -> These APIs let developers broadcast directly to Facebook from any device, not just smartphones. The devices could be high-powered TV cameras or drones. Businesses can use this to showcase live their product launches, cricket matches, award functions (Grammy or Oscars) or in India to beam marriage functions. Ads can be thrown in around these videos for monetization.
4. Instant Articles and related APIs -> These would allow businesses especially publishers to write content freely and stop worrying about how to optimize it for mobile and slow speed networks. This opens up a new channel for publishers to have their content reaching out to readers. The same can be monetized by ads thrown in, probably similar to how Google Ad works with blogs.
5. ‘Save to Facebook’ button on web -> This would allow businesses to add a button to their standard article templates, and whenever a user taps the button, it will save the article or video directly to user’s Facebook queue. This is similar to what Pocket does on browser and thus has its benefits. I see this as a more of necessity for web pages than a choice.
6. Sharing tool for text-> App developers can now add a quote-sharing tool to their apps. As shown in keynote, Amazon is using it in its next Kindle app. Instead of copying and pasting text from Kindle into Facebook, you can simply highlight it and share it to Facebook. Like previous one, this is more of a necessity. But it also provides an opportunity to get more users through FB sharing.
7. Account Kit -> this allows users to sign in with their phone number or email address without the need for a password or even a Facebook account. As Mark pointed out in his keynote, Saavn, music streaming app, saw over half a million registered phone number users and a 33% increase in daily new registrants within the first two months after integrating Account Kit phone number login. Similar success can be seen with other businesses.

(Originally published in LinkedIn- https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-can-businesses-make-best-use-facebooks-upcoming-products-singh?trk=hp-feed-article-title-like)