Skip to content

Send a broadcast message

A broadcast is a one-off message you send to every participant of a chatbot, on one or more of its channels, without waiting for them to message the bot first. Use it to share an announcement, a service update, or a reminder.

Prerequisites

  • You need the Can Invite Participants permission on the team — see the permissions table for which roles have it.
  • The chatbot needs at least one participant-facing channel connected — for example Telegram, WhatsApp, Slack, or Email.

Send a broadcast

  1. Open the chatbot.
  2. Click Broadcast message.
  3. In the dialog, tick the checkbox for each channel you want to send on. You can select more than one.
  4. Type your message in the text box. The counter below it shows how many characters you have left.
  5. Click Send.

Sending queues the broadcast for delivery in the background, so it may take a short while to reach everyone after you click Send.

Which channels you can choose

The dialog only lists the chatbot's own messaging channels — the platforms your participants message the bot on, such as Telegram, WhatsApp, or Email.

  • The chatbot's API, Web, and Evaluations platforms do not support broadcast messages.
  • Disabled channels are left out too.

A broadcast only reaches participants who have messaged the bot before

On each channel you select, the broadcast is delivered to participants using the address from their most recent conversation with the bot on that channel. If someone has never messaged the bot on a particular channel, OCS has no address to deliver to, so the broadcast can't reach them there — even if they've messaged the bot on a different channel.

Message length and formatting

The message box enforces a character limit — the same limit WhatsApp message templates use — shown by the live counter in the dialog.

If one of your channels is WhatsApp, then OCS collapses line breaks and repeated spaces in your message down to single spaces, so the broadcast always arrives as a single paragraph. This happens because WhatsApp message templates reject messages that contain line breaks, and the same message needs to go out over every channel you picked. The dialog warns you about this before you send.

Sending to WhatsApp

If you tick a WhatsApp channel, the dialog shows a warning that your WhatsApp provider needs a new_bot_message message template configured in Meta. This is because a broadcast isn't a reply — it can go out at any time, including outside WhatsApp's 24-hour customer-service window, and WhatsApp only allows messages outside that window if they use an approved template.

See Out-of-service-window template messages for how to create and approve the new_bot_message template in Meta Business Manager. Without it, broadcasts sent to participants who are outside the service window will fail to deliver.

See also