A Reminder to our Community: New Messenger platform policy changes take effect today to help drive more valuable conversations between people and businesses

We want to remind our developer and business community that the Messenger platform policy changes will go into effect today to help ensure that conversations between people and businesses are as valuable for both parties as possible. We announced these changes on August 29, 2019 and extended the effective date on December 20, 2019.

How can businesses adapt to the policy changes?

Here are some simple steps that businesses can take to adapt to the policy changes:

1. Review messages that are typically sent outside the 24 hour standard messaging window. Make sure those messaging use cases are supported by the new message tags that we announced on August 29th.
2. If you are using message tags make sure you are using the new set of tags we announced on August 29th for four use cases including post-purchase updates, event reminders, account updates, and human agent (closed beta). Messages tags should only be used for use cases that are allowed. Make sure the message is timely, important and relevant to the person. As a best practice, we recommend providing an option for people to opt-out of the notifications sent using the message tags and respect the person’s choice.
3. If your page currently has subscription permission (now known as News Messaging beta) and you are a news organization, submit your application to be registered in the Facebook News Page Index.
4. If you are interested in implementing the one-time notification API we announced on February 4, 2020, identify (or work with your developer partner to identify) any use cases or existing flows where this API could be leveraged.
5. We recently published Best Practices for businesses designing messaging experiences on Messenger to help businesses adapt to these policies. We recommend you review these and follow their guidance.

Policy Principles and Updates

We designed our policies to help drive timely and personally relevant conversations between people and businesses — prioritizing conversations started by people and related follow-up communications. The following is a reminder of some of the guiding principles we used to make these policy updates:

1. Conversations that drive value for people and businesses: Messages a person receives from a business should deliver value for that person. Messages should be important, personally relevant and timely.
2. Policies are simple, clear and easy to understand for developers and businesses: For instance, we simplified the number of message tags we offer to make it easier for developers and businesses to build valuable experiences on the platform.
3. Policies help limit low quality experiences for people: The policy should help further limit spam, abuse and low quality experiences on the platform.

As a reminder, here’s a summary of the key changes we announced last year.

• Revised standard messaging window: Updated our standard messaging window to 24 hours since we know people expect businesses to respond quickly to their messages and, not surprisingly, businesses achieve better outcomes when they respond in a timely manner.
• Streamlined message tags: We introduced four new message tags to to allow personalized 1:1 messages to people outside of the standard messaging window.
• News Messaging beta: Only news organizations who successfully register their Pages through the Facebook News Page index can apply to be a part of the News Messaging beta (formerly subscription messaging beta). We introduced this change since some businesses were using subscription messaging in ways that weren’t in line with our policies.

Thank You to Our Community

As always, thanks to our developer ecosystem and business community for continuing to build experiences that enable businesses and people to make closer, more valuable connections on Messenger. We continue to learn from your feedback and partnership and remain committed to supporting innovation that make Messenger a great experience for everyone.