In its most recent earnings call- seriously though, how often does Meta hold one of these? Every other day? We digress. Recently, Meta reiterated its push to monetize messaging, enabling businesses to tap into the growth of private messaging across its apps.
Over the years, Social Media behavior has shifted, as we’re sure most of you have noticed. Where users once posted to the News Feed of their public stories, they’re now increasingly switching to messaging instead, which Meta’s now looking to lean into with new products such as its recently launched ‘Channels’ broadcast chat element. This could be another way to monetize this shift.
Metagram Promotions
As seen in this example posted by Sachin Shah, Meta’s now testing out a new option that encourages business users to highlight relevant products in chats. It’s still unclear what the qualifiers are for this or whether or not it’ll be exclusive to group chats or only to business accounts. As seen in Sachin’s post, some users are now being directly prompted to highlight their products in messaging discussions as another means to promote their offers.
Tapping on ‘Sell Products’ prompt takes you through a quick product listing creation process. It’s essentially a simplified ad flow, though messaging-specific, which could be another way for brands to lean into the messaging shift, and for Meta to make this a more commonplace behavior, as well as a more accepted surface for such promotions.
Again, business messaging is currently one of the company’s key focus points. Meta says that click-to-message ads are one of its fastest-growing ad products, and as users conduct more discussions in private chats, Meta’s very keen to find more ways to let brands into that discussion, thus changing perceptions around how messaging can be used.
It’s a tough nut to crack. Then again, when has anything Meta tried not? Despite numerous efforts, Meta’s never been able to effectively monetize either Messenger or WhatsApp, though, in the latter’s case, that’s shifting, with more brands signing up to WhatsApp’s Business Platform and using WhatsApp messaging for direct connection purposes.
The Wrap
It’s not the biggest of leaps, but seeing such users go from informational queries to transactional ones, as well as additions like these, are another step in a new direction. Expect to see more iterations of this new trend over the next couple of months. If Meta proves successful here, then not only will it potentially improve its overall revenue generation, but that added leeway would also contribute to its efforts in developing the Metaverse.
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