Facebook announced that only verified news Pages can send broadcasts. I personally don't know what it takes to become a verified news Page, but I imagine that less than 1% of Pages doing Messenger can be verified. So any Page that has built a subscriber list on Messenger will be losing the ability to freely connect with those subscribers in January 2020.
This is a big deal. There are organizations out there that have built lists of millions of subscribers and they are losing those subscribers because of this change.
As an alternative to broadcasts, Facebook is pushing Pages to use Sponsored Messages. Sponsored Messages are ads, sent as a message. It's easy to understand why Facebook is doing this, but the Sponsored Message product falls very short of what the messaging platforms offered. As far as I've seen segmentation, timing and personalization are completely lacking from Sponsored Messages. This idea is a round peg being sold to fit a square hole.
All of this is a major change in the (micro) messaging space. Like everyone should have expected, the real winner here is Facebook. The change is devastating for Pages that built subscriber lists, and even worse for the platforms that have been powering messaging campaigns on Messenger. If there is a bright spot, Messenger (and Facebook) could change the entire digital landscape in terms of how businesses think about converting mobile "visitors". IMHO that's been the place to start all along.
