What is a persistent menu in Messenger?

• Size: up to 20 buttons, although Meta’s guidance is to keep it to five.
• Two button types. A URL button opens a web page; a postback button sends the business a hidden payload, and its bot replies in the chat.
• A Get Started button comes first. Without one set on the Page, the menu doesn’t appear.
• Timing: a change to the Page’s menu can take up to 24 hours to show. A menu set for one person overrides it and updates straight away.
• Languages: each locale can have its own menu, with a default one as the fallback.
• Devices: it shows in the Messenger app on iPhone and Android from version 106, but not in Facebook’s mobile browser.

The menu stays available for the whole conversation, and Messenger brings it back into view when someone returns after a while away. That makes it the place for things people need at any point, not just at the start.

Good menu items answer the questions that keep coming back, or take people somewhere they’d otherwise ask for a link to. A restaurant’s menu might look like this:

Keep a route to a person. A menu made only of automated paths frustrates anyone whose question doesn’t fit, and they’ll type it anyway.

Setting composer_input_disabled to true hides the text box, leaving the menu as the only way to interact. That can suit a narrow bot, one that only books appointments, say. For most businesses it backfires: customers want to ask their own questions, and a chat they can’t type into looks broken.

With the text box left on, which is the default, people can tap or type, and whatever they type reaches the business as an ordinary message.