DULUTH, Ga. - ColoradoDesk -- Ismail Sirdah, outlined several ways his own small business has benefited from incorporating Facebook Messenger. In detailing how the platform has helped his photography business excel, Ismail Sirdah also highlighted some of the universal benefits available to small business owners who utilize Facebook Messenger to connect with their customers.

Reach Customers Where They Already Are

Perhaps the most compelling and salient rationale for incorporating Messenger into your small business is illustrated with a single statistic offered by Flurry Analytics: Over the last year, the amount of time spent on messaging platforms and social media increased by nearly 400 percent.

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Reduced Friction for Users

Even if the preceding steps were easy to carry out — and, just to be clear, they are not — getting your customers to use the app is still the most difficult obstacle to overcome: Even though apps account for 85 percent of the time users spend on smartphones, that time is dominated by an average of just five apps. This is why Facebook is touting Messenger as a "frictionless" platform, as it eliminates all the hurdles most likely to deter customers from using an app that fosters communication with your small business.

Compelling and Essential Interactions

When Messenger was first introduced, the automated chat agents were not nearly as sophisticated as they are today. The experiences your customers are exposed to through Facebook Messenger are far more robust than ever before, as they now feature location sharing, native payments, and complex interfaces, along with a number of other features that make the platform both compelling and essential for small business owners as well as their customers.

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Messenger Enables Improvements in Customer Service, Acquisition, and Ecommerce

Facebook believes that small businesses will see tangible improvements in several key areas after incorporating Messenger, and Sirdah agrees that the platform delivers on that promise — especially when it comes to customer service, ecommerce, and customer acquisition. Using Messenger for customer service not only improved customer satisfaction among Sirdah's customers, but it also served as an ideal medium through which the small business owner could re-engage customers in order to drive revenue.