Denis Opudo
Facebook is making maximum utilization of its partnership with WhatsApp after the latter did away with possibilities of placing ads into its app. Facebook is now looking for ways of utilizing the hugely messaging platform that has almost 1 billion daily users. The social media site launched a new ad unit which will make businesses develop a link between two platforms. Advertisers will be able to include a button on their ads so that people can call or message through WhatsApp with the click of a button.
Facebook is planning to start up the gradual rolling out of the program beginning with Australia, North and South America, Africa and most parts of Asia. The exclusion of Europe is not related to the fact that Facebook reduced their efforts to share data between the two platforms when it was seen to work against data protection laws. The plans are underway to introduce Europe later on after observing how the feature has been used in the other parts of the world. There are also questions from the public on how the partnership will work they again have to clear the air first on that.
The launch will follow on the more general developments on how WhatsApp is currently used by businesses. Already above 1 million Facebook Pages include WhatsApp numbers in their post every month, meaning that there is already developing between the two companies being used by businesses more informally to connect with customers more directly. In some upcoming markets businesses are already their WhatsApp and Facebook pages as their primary points of contact for users, now it will only call for expansion to Facebook, as the new White and Yellow Pages respectively.
WhatsApp has been working to on a way of creating more specific business accounts for quite a while. A few days back it posted some more information in its assist pages on how business accounts will be verified, confirmed or unconfirmed. The new ad unit resembles the click-to-Messenger ads that were previously rolled down by Facebook. Currently, Facebook is not in a rush to add the Whatsapp button development to regular consumer services. However, one can see the potential for putting the links Pages where users want to give a contact address, or in the Marketplace next to items that are being sold, or even in job listings.
