There are 7.7 billion people in the world and roughly a third of them use social media (2.7B). So when the biggest social media messaging platforms are talking about a potential integration it is BIG news. Last week, news broke that Facebook is reportedly considering a merger of its three messaging platforms – WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger. This would allow users of the app to send messages between networks to make communication easier. Between Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp, they handle 60 billion messages per day. WOW.
What’s exciting about this is end-to-end encryption across the board and great potential for advertisers. But still, experts are worried about this potential integration because while WhatsApp has a security feature that prevents anyone from intercepting the contents of the messages, Facebook does not. And with Facebook’s security track record, people are nervous.
Facebook is aware of these concerns telling the Guardian in a statement that “We want to build the best messaging experience we can; and people want messaging to be fast, simple, reliable and private. We’re working on making more of our messaging products end-to-end encrypted and considering ways to make it easier to reach friends and family across networks.”
On top of the worries from experts, the companies themselves aren’t too pleased. Both WhatsApp and Instagram’s CEOs departed the companies after the Facebook acquisition and the New York Times recently reported on employee rifts between Facebook and WhatsApp employees over the merge. But, the potential for ad revenue is helping them to overlook these internal issues as this merger would be very compelling for advertisers to be able to reach so many people at once.
With a lot of kinks to work out, this isn’t expected to be announced for two years. If/when this integration happens, brands are going to be forced to up the ante when it comes to the way they use messaging services to reach their audiences. Stay tuned for more…
Source: http://sclhs.in/m0HYif
-Sarah Aiken
Community Editor