The first message

Let’s look into how we can organize the first contact the user has with your bot.

A lot of messengers support the option of setting up a message description in which you can specify exactly what your bot can provide the user with.

How to set up the first message in Telegram

Such a greeting in Telegram you can set up in botfather. It will show up simultaneously with the start button when the user opens up the bot through the link.

You need to contact @BotFather (the bot that registers new bots) and type the command /setdescription. The description of the bot is the exact text that will be visible to all users before the beginning of the dialogue.

How to set up the first message in Facebook

Facebook also has a bot description which shows up simultaneously with the start button. It can be set up in the project’s settings on Salebot.

How to set up the first message in Viber

Such a message in Viber can be set up in the section “Response to the user’s first message” in the project’s settings. You can also add buttons to it.

How to set up the first message in Whatsapp

There are no bots in Whatsapp, thus there are no such messages and buttons, but you can add a text which’ll be written in the input field and the user will just need to hit send on it. This is a kind of analogue for the /start button. To learn how to get the link, visit the article Links to messengers.

How to set up the first message in Online-chat

For online-chat you can add not only the text for the first message but also a list of buttons leading from it. Use these two boxes from the project’s settings to achieve this.

“Response to the user’s first message” is created to reply to the user’s first message when the bot doesn’t know the answer so that the user gets a hint about which commands are in the bot. You can also add buttons that will be attached to the message. This message is only sent once and its priority is the lowest.

To create a universal answer-message for every messenger, you need to create the block “Primary condition check” and check “Answer once” in its settings. In this case the bot will answer any first message with this answer and lead them through the chain of the workflow.