Connect a Facebook Page

You connect a Facebook Page when you want messages sent to that Page on Messenger to appear as conversations in Atender. Each connected Page becomes one Meta channel.

Before you start

• A user role that can edit channel settings (Owner or Admin) in Atender.
• Admin access to the Facebook Page on Facebook’s side. Only Page admins can grant the access tokens Atender needs.
• A team configured in Settings → Teams that conversations should route to by default.

Steps

1. Open Settings → Meta Channels.
2. Click Add Channel.
3. On the General tab, give the channel a name (internal — used to identify it in the channels list), and make sure Enabled is on. Confirm the Facebook Messenger toggle is on.
4. Save. The dialog moves to the Connection tab.
5. Click Connect to Meta. A Facebook login popup opens.
6. Log in with the Facebook account that admins the Page.
7. Authorize the permissions Atender requests — these are the messaging permissions Facebook requires for a Page-to-business chat integration.
8. Back in Atender, you’ll see a list of Pages your account admins. Click the Page you want to connect.
9. Atender exchanges tokens with Facebook and confirms the connection. The Connection tab now shows the Page as linked.
10. Go to the Routing tab and pick the default team the channel should route to.
11. (Optional) Go to the Messages tab and configure the bot name and welcome message customers see when they start a new conversation.
12. (Optional) Go to the AI Agent tab to hand the channel off to an Agent Stack for autonomous handling.
13. Save.

Verify it worked

From a Facebook account that does not admin the Page (a test account or a colleague’s), send a message to the Page on Messenger. Within seconds:

• The conversation should appear in Atender’s inbox under the team you routed to, or with the AI Agent if you enabled one.
• The contact record should be created with the customer’s Facebook display name.

Disconnecting

If you need to disconnect the Page later — Page ownership changed, you’re retiring the channel, etc.:

1. Open Settings → Meta Channels, click the pencil icon on the channel row.
2. Go to the Connection tab.
3. Click Unlink.
4. Confirm.

The channel record stays in your settings but no longer receives messages. Existing conversations are preserved; new inbound messages won’t be created until you re-link.

Troubleshooting

• Symptom: Facebook popup closes immediately without showing pages. Fix: A browser popup blocker likely intercepted it. Disable it for Atender’s domain and retry. If you’re using Safari, try Chrome — Safari is stricter about cross-site OAuth popups.

• Symptom: Facebook lists pages but yours is missing. Fix: You’re not an admin on the missing Page. Ask the actual admin to either give your Facebook account admin access on the Page, or to do the connection step themselves.

• Symptom: Connection completes but no inbound messages arrive. Fix: Confirm Facebook actually delivered the webhook subscription — sometimes the OAuth flow finishes successfully but the webhook subscription failed silently. Disconnect and reconnect to refresh the subscription.

• Symptom: Inbound works, but agent replies fail to deliver. Fix: Facebook restricts replies to within a 24-hour messaging window after the customer’s last message, except for specific allowed message types. If you’re replying outside that window, the reply will fail. Reply within the window, or use one of Facebook’s allowed message tags.

See also

• The Messenger channel