Facebook Inc. announced Messenger Platform 2.2 Tuesday, bringing a variety of new business-friendly features to the messaging service.

New features in Messenger Platform 2.2 will help both developers and businesses “reach their customers in new and engaging ways,” according to Facebook’s blog post. The company announced in September that Facebook Messenger is now used by more than 1.3 billion users every month.

The last major Messenger Platform update was in July, when Facebook unveiled built-in natural language processing, a payments software development kit, new Call-to-Action buttons and the global beta of a handover protocol.

The company announced during its third-quarter earnings call last week that it has more than 20 million businesses that use Facebook monthly to communicate with customers. Last week also saw the announcement of the rollout of sponsored messages to all businesses. Sponsored messages, previously available to a small group of businesses, will pop up in the Messenger home screen, but aren’t marked as ads, like normal Messenger ads.   

Here’s a look at the new features in Messenger Platform 2.2:

Customer chat plugin

One of the main new features in Messenger Platform 2.2 is the customer chat plugin, which will allow for cross-platform communication with a brand.

The customer chat plugin, which is currently available in a closed beta, allows a customer to continue their conversation with a business on the company website and in Messenger, across web, mobile or tablet, while retaining the chat context and history.

The plugin also supports current Messenger capabilities, including natural language processing, payments and rich media.

Facebook Messenger’s customer chat plugin is currently in a closed beta being used by companies like AdoreMe, Air France, Argos, Aviva (Eurofil), Bodeaz, Elves, Goibibo, Keto Mojo, KLM, Mermaid Pillow, Spoqa, Total Activation, Volaris and Zalando. Those interested in the plugin for their business can sign up for updates here.

Media template

The new media template will enable businesses to attach a call-to-action button when sending videos, images or GIFs. It will include, for example, a share button yjsy will allow businesses to take action and improve engagement.

Broadcast application programming interface

Facebook is releasing a Broadcast API in open beta, which gives pages like news and sports sites, the ability to send messages to multiple subscribers with a single API request. Pages will need to have the pages_messaging_subscriptions permission and would be able to broadcast breaking news alerts, score updates from specific games and teams and more.

Page-level feedback

To make it easier for businesses to view how people rated their Messenger experience, businesses can use the new Page-level feedback feature, click Page Settings > Messenger. This feature provides an aggregation of all feedback from multiple service providers in a single place.  

Additional language support for built-in NLP

With Messenger Platform 2.1, Facebook launched built-in NLP, but it was only available in English. Now with 2.2, Facebook is making built-in NLP available in Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish and Vietnamese. Facebook said the default NLP model will detect date and time, location, amount of money, phone number and email in all the supported languages.

Additional features

Handover protocol

Handover protocol, also unveiled in beta in version 2.1, allows businesses to move seamlessly between bot and human within their Messenger bot. The feature is now available globally.

New Message Tags

Facebook has added two new Message Tags, which allows the sending of messages outside of the normally allowed 24-hour window for certain purposes. The new Message Tags include “application update,” which will update the message recipient of their application, for example, a job application. The new “pairing update” will notify the recipient of a pairing based on a prior request, for example, the availability of a parking spot.

Page Insights API

Provides businesses with a programmatic way to retrieve various metrics, including the number of messages delivered per broadcast ID, which is also available in a business’ Page management console.

Image: Facebook