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Facebook Messenger to Slack... names? can we respond via Slack?

  • 10 April 2020
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2 questions on the Facebook Inbox / Messenger integrations to Slack

 

  • How do you get Facebook to send across the name of the user who’s messaging?  At the moment it comes across with just the message and no definable detail.
  • Is there a way for our team to respond to people on Facebook Messenger inside Slack?
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Best answer by nicksimard 13 April 2020, 20:47

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Hi there!

To answer your questions:

 

  1. Unfortunately, this is a restriction on Facebook's side. Users have to opt-in to sharing that information, so it is only available some of the time. The way things work behind the scenes, we get the message webhook which has a user ID (a page-scoped user id or PSID, which is specific to the page). We can then do a secondary call to look up their user info using that ID. It uses this endpoint: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/messenger-platform/identity/user-profile/. Here's the direct link to the info about how users can opt in: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/messenger-platform/identity/user-profile/#optin
  2. You are able to respond to someone who has messaged you, by using this action and having the Sender PSID for the person you’d like to respond to: 
     


    In order to do it from Slack, that’s going to be a little trickier to set up. Not impossible, but you’ll have to figure out which workflow will make the most sense for you. I’d suggest checking out the Slack triggers here to see which of those might work best for you. Some things to consider: Would you send the messages to a public Slack channel? Would you want the person responding to that thread? Maybe add a reacji to the message? Or use the New Pushed Message trigger?  

    Another thing to consider is that you’ll need a way to both send the Sender PSID to Slack and also get access to that when you have a Zap trigger on something. Not sure how possible that will be, honestly. You may have to do some copying and pasting, where that gets sent to Slack and whoever responds copies and pastes that into their response.

Why don’t you take a stab at it to see if you can come up with something, and if you get stuck we’re here to help :)