VP of Facebook’s Ad Department Eyes Business Messaging Monetization Opportunity
In the month of March, the social networking site Facebook made possible the communication between select businesses and its users, estimated to be around 1.5 billion, through messaging service, Messenger. Now the company is planning to mint money through exploring this possibility.
The idea of connecting the consumers through messaging via social networking, with the business houses is still in developing stages. However the vice president of Facebook’s advertising department, Andrew Bosworth said on Tuesday that he can visualize this feature in the lights of exceptionally vital monetization prospects.
“We’re at the very early stages of businesses having direct relationships with customers through messaging”, added Bosworth in the course of an on-stage conference held in San Francisco during TechCrunch Disrupt. “We start with the consumer behaviors. If you think about consumers communicating to businesses through messaging, it’s not a big leap to go from that to a monetization strategy”.
At present, Messenger has a base of 700 million cyclic active users every month and then it is not the lone Facebook tool that facilitates consumers to get directly in touch with the businesses. In his survey, Bosworth also found that some of the foreign countries, for instance, Spain, people time and again have a preference to make bookings through the messaging app WhatsApp, owned by Facebook, instead of calling the business directly over the phone.
Bosworth added, “[Consumers] want to do it on their favorite messaging service”.
“There’s tremendous opportunity in the messaging space to invest a lot more in that experience”.
An alternative of messaging the businesses directly on Facebook is through Facebook pages designed for businesses, an option that is growing rapidly. Facebook users have the option to contact concerned businesses through their official Facebook pages and the latest data has shown an increase in the unique visits by 40% year after year, added Bosworth. Lately, Facebook has launched a new service for business through which they can ask the users to message their page through a call to action provided in form of ads, the service is called “click-to-message”.
“We expect them to be really popular”, said Bosworth regarding the ad product. “There are 45 million active pages in Facebook’s ecosystem. That’s only growing over time”.
“It’s really a testament that Pages really are your online presence”, added Bosworth.
Bosworth was also asked regarding “Instant Articles” the fresh News Feed initiative of Facebook which opens new avenues of a partnership between the social network site and publishers, enabling the latter to host complete news articles over the systems news feed, Bosworth confronted the statement that the initiative is a hazard to the publishers.
Bosworth further added in his statement that, “Fundamentally what we’re trying to do is work with publishers to find a way to give users a better experience”. “Most people who consume news content don’t want journalists to go out of business. Leading with consumer interest is actually the best thing, not just for consumers, but for the long term for content creators, advertisers and ultimately Facebook”.
