Facebook announces New Products to Make Business Messaging Easier
The way people and businesses communicate is changing. One billion people message a business each week on WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram Direct — whether it’s DMing brands, browsing product catalogues, asking for support, or interacting with stories.
This consumer behaviour is accelerating and it’s changing how business gets done. Today at Conversations, the inaugural business messaging event, Facebook discussed how messaging is transforming interactions between people and businesses and announced new products to make conversations easier.
Introducing Cloud-based API on the WhatsApp Business Platform
Today, Mark Zuckerberg announced opening up the new, cloud-based version of the WhatsApp Business Platform, hosted by Meta, to any business across the world. This new API offers free, secure cloud hosting services so businesses and developers can easily access service within minutes, and build directly on top of WhatsApp to customize their experience and increase their response time for their customers. So now, whether a business wants to work with one 100+ partners or access the service directly, it will be much faster to get up and running on WhatsApp.
When growing a business, you need smart, robust and easy-to-use conversation tools. For smaller businesses using the WhatsApp Business app, Facebook building tools so it’s easier to handle an influx of chats as they grow their customer base.
Launching Recurring Notifications on Messenger
Today announced a new way for businesses to keep the conversation going with Recurring Notifications. As businesses acquire new customers and begin to scale operations, there’s an incredible opportunity to build loyalty and trust — and believe this is where the value of messaging really shines. This new capability makes it easy to re-engage people right in the messaging thread and deliver tailored messaging at the best time for customers, whether to hear about special promotions, new product drops or tips and tricks.
People can choose the topics they'd like to let people opt-in to, how often customers can hear from them and shape their content, is so the messages are always on-brand and relevant. Recurring notifications will also be available for businesses on Instagram this fall.
Facebook also highlighted the click-to-message ads to help customers immediately start conversations with businesses, the CRM platform Kustomer and Meta Business Suite for higher volumes of messages across Facebook, Messenger and Instagram. Read more about the product investments in business messaging on the Meta for Developers blog.
Source: FB