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Users interacting with a Facebook Page Messenger for the first time will see a Welcome Screen that displays a “Get Started” button. When a user taps the button, the Messenger Platform will send a postback event to the registered webhook. A “Get Started” message will be posted into the conversation which now grants your bot the permission to send and receive messages from the user.

Enabling the “Get Started” button only requires a few easy steps.

Postman

Download and install the Postman application. It is a very handle tool that every developer should have for sending requests to different API endpoints.

After installing, launch the Postman application and create a New Request project.

Setting up the Get Started Button

1. Change the “GET” to “POST” type of request.

2. Set the API endpoint URL.

https://graph.facebook.com/v6.0/me/messenger_profile?access_token=**PAGE_ACCESS_TOKEN**

Update the “access_token” parameter using the actual token that you can generate in your App Dashboard for the Facebook page you want to add the “Get Started” button.

3. Set the “Content/Type” in the “Headers” tab to “application/json”.

4. Navigate to the “Body” section and select the “raw” format. Then paste the following JSON.

{
   "get_started":{
      "payload":"{\"type\":\"legacy_reply_to_message_action\",\"message\":\"Get Started\"}"
    }
}

5. Lastly, click the “Send” button. You will see the following response if the request you made is successful.

And to have it verified, open up the Messenger app in your mobile phone and search for your Facebook Page’s profile.

There you’ve got it! You’ve just created the “Get Started” button on your Facebook Messenger Bot. If it’s not the first time you interact with the page, you need to delete the previous conversation for the changes to take effect.

After these steps, you can already add a persistent menu to give your users an interactive and personalized experience within your messenger bot.