How to add a Greeting text for Facebook messenger bot

On the previous posts ,we have seen how to add a Get started button to messenger bot and how to add a persistent menu .On this tutorial we are going to see another option to customize your bot using a personalized and localized greeting text .

The greeting text is only shown on the first interaction of a user with the bot ,you can use it to tell or introduce the bot to users .

The greeting text is local aware which means that you can add multiple greeting texts ,one for each local and a greeting text for the default local which will be set if no greeting text is matching the user's local .

How to add a greeting text to messenger bots ?

So now after ,we have seen where and when greeting texts are used ,how can we add a greeting text to a messenger bot ?

To set a greeting text we just need to send a Post request to your messenger profile url with your page access token https://graph.facebook.com/v2.6/me/messengerprofile?accesstoken=PAGEACCESSTOKEN

So using a curl

curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{
"greeting":[
    {
    "locale":"default",
    "text":"Greeting text for default local !"
    }, {
    "locale":"en_US",
    "text":"Greeting text for en_US local !"
    }
] 
}' "https://graph.facebook.com/v2.6/me/messenger_profile?access_token=PAGE_ACCESS_TOKEN"    

Replace PAGEACCESSTOKEN with your generated page access token .

If the operation is successful you'll get the following response

{
"result":"success"
}

On the same way you can delete the greeting text using a DELETE request .

So again using curl

curl -X DELETE -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{
"fields":[
    "greeting"
]
}' "https://graph.facebook.com/v2.6/me/messenger_profile?access_token=PAGE_ACCESS_TOKEN"    

How to personalize greeting text ?

You can add a bit of personalization to your greeting text using user's name via three template strings

For example

curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{
"greeting":[
    {
    "locale":"default",
    "text":"Welcome !"
    }
] 
}'  "https://graph.facebook.com/v2.6/me/messenger_profile?access_token=PAGE_ACCESS_TOKEN"