Social-Media
Facebook blends Messenger and Instagram chats in a new small business app.
Facebook is releasing a new app to help small business owners manage accounts and profiles through Facebook , Messenger, and Instagram, COO Sheryl Sandberg revealed on Thursday's blog post. The software, called the Facebook Business Suite, would integrate the back end infrastructure of the three applications so that small business owners can receive messages from consumers, updates, and notifications in a single unified inbox. The company has reported to The Verge that it plans to incorporate WhatsApp integration in the future.
The app would also let small businesses post on Facebook and Instagram at the same time and provide insights into how ad campaigns are being run on the platforms.
Most of this cross-posting feature is already available to administrators of Instagram company accounts connected to Facebook Pages.
Integrating its services has been on Facebook's to-do list for a while; last year, the company decided to merge the messaging features of WhatsApp , Instagram, & Messenger, keeping all three apps separate yet allowing cross-app communications. Axios confirmed that Facebook had been planning a cohesive message for the business feature as early as February 2019.
We had the idea that Instagram & Facebook Messenger chats were being incorporated, but this is the first official announcement of a feature explicitly targeted to small business owners.
Of course, Facebook's indications that it was preparing to merge its messaging apps have sparked fears among antitrust regulators. As part of a 2019 study on Facebook's privacy policies, the European Parliament cautioned that the social media giant 's strategy to incorporate its messaging was a possible obstacle to competition. The size of this exchange of data risks is being dramatically increased, given the news that, by early 2020, Facebook plans to merge the Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp technological infrastructure, which has more than 2.6 billion users among them, the report said.
In addition to the latest business app, Facebook published the third edition of its ongoing research on how small businesses handle the coronavirus pandemic and a research report commissioned by Deloitte on customer buying habits. Forty-eight percent of customers surveyed said they had increased their online spending since the epidemic began, and 73% of those who started to sponsor new businesses during the pandemic said that at least one was a small business.
Facebook plans to make the business tool available to small businesses first and to expand it out to larger businesses in the future.
