The LINE Official Account 2.0 Era Is Here: A Chance for Deeper Conversations with Your Friends

I know small and midsize businesses in Taiwan are terrified by LINE’s steep price hike. For the average merchant, the LINE Official Account 2.0 plan is a textbook “fatten them up, then slaughter them” play.

At a briefing LINE held not long ago, LINE itself used the same phrase with a twist of irony. The gist: if merchants still don’t segment and keep blasting posts at friends the old way, they’ll eventually rack up excessive blocks, which is a form of suicide.

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They’re right, but the size of LINE’s price increase is still hard to believe.

Take a LINE account with 20,000 reachable friends that posts an average of 1 message a day. That’s 600,000 messages a month. Under 2.0, on the high-volume plan, you’d pay LINE NT$62,270 a month.

Before 2.0, even if you picked an API plan and hooked up all kinds of extra features, you paid only NT$3,888 a month. That’s a jump of 16.02 times.

Keep in mind that 20,000 reachable friends and one post a day are conservative estimates, roughly the scale of a small or midsize merchant. Searchable official accounts on LINE routinely have six-figure friend counts, and they also pay LINE hefty verification fees. Spending millions a month in marketing budget on LINE alone is something words can hardly explain.

Want the details of the LINE Official Account 2.0 plans? Click here

Now, to the point: how to respond to the LINE Official Account 2.0 era.

(OakMega’s little characters are kind of cute)

You read that right: precise segmentation, stronger traffic driving, and group management. Let me walk you through them one by one.

Heads-up: everything below is a remedy offered by OakMega’s own products

Precisely segmented LINE posts

Before we get into segmentation, here’s a short interview I really like: Is martech all thunder and no rain? Ogilvy’s Chief Digital Officer: There’s only one big challenge in 2019.

“One-to-one means personalized messages built on data and user profiles, and it involves data, systems, and creativity.”

Sounds like a grand vision, but how do I actually do it?

Our in-house LINE friend management dashboard, BotFat, comes with every tool you need to track and analyze LINE friend data.

Now, just by posting and designing chatbots in BotFat, you can easily learn what your LINE friends really want.

Whenever a friend interacts with a post or link you publish, the system automatically tags them, and you can then use those tags to send segmented posts. (Interacting means clicking a link or using the post interaction module we designed. That’s right: borrowing from other social media, we built a module that lets friends react to posts with a like, a heart, a crying face, a share, and more. More interaction makes users stickier, so they’re less likely to block you after receiving broadcast after broadcast.)

From now on, you’ll never feel lost when sending a broadcast, and you’ll never worry about pouring a big chunk of marketing budget onto friends who may have zero interest in that message.

Even better, every friend tag is fully customizable: manual tags, tag names, even the tag hierarchy. I’m confident this is far more precise than segmenting by demographics such as gender or region.

I won’t claim segmentation saves you a ton of money. But the more precise you are, the better your LINE conversions and the higher your ROI. And yes, you’ll still save some money.

Stronger traffic driving

What does driving traffic mean on LINE? It starts with BotFat’s chatbot architecture: “Template Design” + “Smart Reply.”

With “Template Design,” you decide what the chatbot replies when a friend asks a specific question. BotFat supports a wide range of formats: text, stickers, images, videos, Flex Message, Imagemap, Quick Reply, and more. You can also connect APIs to give friends extra features, and if you want Carousel-style messages, we can fully custom-design them for you.

Flex Message is what we at OakMega call the card message format. You can place all kinds of web apps (that is, websites) on it. When a friend taps a web app, LINE doesn’t close and open a separate browser. Instead, a full, tall, half, or compact browser window slides up from the bottom right inside LINE, which greatly improves the friend’s experience.

Further reading: What content the LINE Messaging API offers.
Further reading: LINE Flex Message.

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By combining Flex Message with web apps, you can neatly organize your existing website and social links and present them to friends cleanly and elegantly. With no extra development costs, you can effectively drive friends to external links and boost conversions, and you can publish or pull content in real time as campaigns come and go.

“Smart Reply,” on the other hand, answers friends’ messages in plain text. It has plenty of uses, such as keeping your chatbot on top of the latest trends. When a new topic is hot, do you want your chatbot to hear “honey lemon” and reply only “Sorry, I don’t understand”? That’s how friends quietly slip away.

Use LINE’s built-in Rich Menu together with “Template Design,” “Smart Reply,” and Quick Reply to guide friends and drive traffic, and you’ll never worry about friends getting lost in a sea of broadcasts. (Side note: we can also build a custom feature that shows different Rich Menus to friends in different marketing scenarios.)

Take advantage of the fact that chatbot replies to friends are free.
Present brand information, campaigns, or purchase pages to friends systematically through your chatbot. You’ll lower operating costs while driving more traffic and conversions.

Group management

When you hear “LINE groups plus chatbots,” do you picture 2017, when the Kamigo bot took over everyone’s groups and spammed nonsense at everybody?

It doesn’t have to be that way. Every merchant’s LINE@ account (soon to be renamed Official Account across the board) can be treated as a chatbot, an individual account, and it can be added to groups!

Once your LINE@ account joins a group, you can post there and collect how friends and non-friends behave in the group: conversations, clicks, activity, even who the opinion leaders are. You can also design chatbot replies that appear only in groups.

BotFat collects all interaction data in the group for you, with no manual line-by-line checking

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Imagine this: PX Mart starts running local community groups for each store and invites regular customers from the neighborhood to join. From then on, location-specific promotions can go straight to the right groups. Group conversations strengthen customers’ connection to the brand, and the store can even reach out to opinion leaders in the group to spread new business opportunities.

Group management is a new community marketing approach introduced by OakMega, and we’re currently the only ones in the market developing it. Highly engaged users in groups are your opening for deeper conversations with friends.

One last thing

BotFat also offers full LINE community analytics, real-time automatic switching to one-on-one customer service, multi-format broadcasts, and much more. Want to connect your own CRM or integrate machine learning features such as image, voice, or even video recognition? No problem. We offer custom development for all of it.

To be fair, LINE’s price hike does have its reasons. More than 20 million people in Taiwan use LINE everywhere in their daily lives, and LINE offers a complete social ecosystem, including media, payments, and entertainment. Users basically can’t leave the LINE ecosystem, so owning your LINE community gives your brand enormous marketing influence.

LINE Official Account 2.0 also brings new features and a marketing blueprint that hit all the right notes. With LINE’s APIs, merchants can run their communities on complete data, have deeper conversations with friends, strengthen customer relationships, and deliver truly performance-driven marketing.

The only problem is that such a staggering price hike, at a stage when real conversion results can’t yet be quantified, is bound to scare merchants off. OakMega can help you welcome the LINE Official Account 2.0 era with far fewer worries✌️.

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