Already, Facebook has dominated mobile advertising with more opportunity to delve into WhatsApp messenger as well.
Executives of Facebook at a press conference where they fielded questions from the press during New York Advertising Week said that the company sees its messaging apps as apps that will benefit brands.
Ads and pages engineering vice president of Facebook, Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, said that consumers have been able to work well with the businesses which the advertisers can use as an advantageous to push their businesses.
Bosworth said that although the company has not ruled out any further monetization of the apps, the major concern is to make sure that their customers have a great experience making use of the apps. Citing Brazil as an example, Bosworth said that the users have been able to make connections on a large scale with restaurants by mere use of WhatsApp.
He said that the goal of the company is to make the Newsfeed experience for the consumers to be also great. And that if they are able to achieve that with advertising content that is of interest to consumers then what they will have is a win-win situation, Facebook COO, Sheryl Sandberg said.
According to EMarketer, about 2.19 billion users will make use of the app by 2019. WhatsApp in February announced that it has reached a 1 billion user mark all over the world.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, and at the QI 2016 Facebook convention said at the moment not less than 900 million users are making use of their messenger which is now separate from the Facebook itself.
Other messaging apps that are popular such as WeChat, QQ, Line have made use of marketing tools and bots to increase their revenue yield. With the help of bots, brands have been able to have conversations that are personalized and also receive recommendations from consumers as they chat from the comfort of their various devices wherever they. This trend is one that consumers are embracing as can be seen in Asian countries.
We are not to forget that at the moment Facebook is facing challenges in Germany concerning its plan to share users’ data of WhatsApp. Protection Commissioner of Hamburg data has at the moment prevented Facebook from getting user data from WhatsApp. They went ahead to ask Facebook to delete Germany users’ data of about 35 million. According to the commissioner, users are the ones to choose whether to allow Facebook make use of their data and not vice versa.
Sandberg noted that the company works with regulators all over the world and that users of WhatsApp also make use of the Facebook app.
