Facebook’s World
You may or may not already know that Facebook owns Instagram and WhatsApp, making them a Social Media powerhouse by getting Social Media Connected. They even tried to buy Snapchat a few years ago, but their $3bn offer was deemed too low!
Social Media Connected
Mark Zuckerberg’s original idea for Facebook was to be able to connect people, and it’s certainly happening. A recent announcement from Facebook stated that you will soon be able to respond to messages from any of the platforms they own, without switching apps. It’s said that for instance, a WhatsApp user would be able to message an Instagram user; how accurate that is, remains to be seen.
Here’s where you might see Instagram in your Facebook messenger
That said, Instagram Direct messages are moving into Facebook messenger, so perhaps they’ll all end up in Facebook messenger, rather than the option to respond and connect from any of the platforms. If you’re a business with both Instagram and Facebook, you’ll notice that you can already see comments from Instagram within your Facebook messenger centre.
Check out this video to see how it might look for you
Business Benefits
If you’re a business that is active on Instagram and regularly receive messages and enquiries, this is likely to be incredibly useful to you and may streamline some processes you have as well as making sure you don’t miss any of those pesky “message requests”.
Facebook Pages using Groups
Other innovations that are coming from Facebook will include the ability for Pages to interact with groups. There is already some evidence of this, and we’ve only seen it on mobile so far. Whilst pages can create groups for their followers to convene and chat already, this new feature will allow Pages to join groups that relate to their communities and creates more potential opportunities for a business. Pages will be able to connect with and reach more people, which should help to raise their own profile whilst coupled with the more conventional methods of advertising. This seems like Facebook is understanding the way that Twitter works and is implementing their equivalent option. There may be a drawback however; could you be bombarded with hard selling and relentless promotion? Perhaps Facebook will consider putting in place some regulations to make sure they’re still earning from Facebook advertising.
Facebook Subscription Groups
The final new addition from Facebook is subscription groups. They’re currently being piloted with a few test groups to see how they fair. Selling Groups for example have seen huge developments in a short time, from simply existing as groups and posting a picture with a bit of information; to now having a full template of price, location, postage, item and description as well as images, they’re essentially undercutting eBay, so perhaps it won’t be long before you have pay to sell too?
Would you use a subscription group for your business? Would you join a subscription group? What do you think of the changes that are coming? Let us know in the comments below.