How users engage with content

Pippa Updated by Pippa

If you’ve read our article on how to load content, you can start setting up your chat-service menu.

At this point, you’ve probably given the information you’d like to share via your chat service some thought. Perhaps you’d like to answer some frequently asked questions, share news updates or useful information, or encourage your users to read and listen to stories.

Regardless of the kind of content you’ll be sharing, you’ll have to structure it to make the content easy to consume on WhatsApp. 

Let’s take a quick look at how users typically engage with content via WhatsApp chat services:

  1. A user opens up a chat service and uses a word like “hi” or “hello” to indicate that they’d like to use the service.
  2. “Hi” or “hello” triggers an action and the user receives a pre-populated, automated message. This message is an important one, as it’s the tool the user will use to start navigating through the rest of the chat service content. A short, well-structured menu of numbers, emojis and/or keyword text that points to the content categories in the chat service works really well here. 

Have a look at the below example from the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 chat service:

This menu can be likened to a navigation bar on a website. However, instead of clicking on a link to see the content in a web section, the user can navigate to the content they’d like to consume in the chat service by replying to this message with the number, emoji or bold keyword shortcut of the category they’d like to explore. 

Let’s take this example one step further to show you what happens next: 

The above message was automatically sent to a user when they replied to the menu with the number “1”, which corresponded with the “LATEST” category. You’ll notice that they immediately received an important update on the COVID-19 situation in South Africa.

At the bottom of this menu, they’re given information on how to get back to the main menu or navigate to another section. If the user messages “0”, the main menu is automatically sent again. In this way, they can navigate through all the categories in the chat service and learn everything they need to know about COVID-19.

Now let's start structuring and planning content.

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