WhatsApp adds green
badges for new verified accounts
WhatsApp has introduced verified accounts for businesses.
They’re designed to make it easier for
consumers and businesses to communicate with each other, and a green badge with
a white tick helps them stand out from regular accounts.
WhatsApp
is taking its next steps towards monetization, with the hugely popular
messaging app announcing a range of new features designed to better facilitate business use.
Like Facebook’s grey verification badges (not
the blue ones, those are significantly different),
all businesses on WhatsApp will soon be able to get their own official tick –
you provide a business phone number and/or relevant contact info linked to your
official account, go through the verification process, and you’ll be able to
cement your official brand status within the app.
WhatsApp verification badges will make it easier for you to
stand out on the platform, while also providing assurance to your customers
that they are, in fact, speaking to the official brand account, as opposed to
scammers.
In addition to this, WhatsApp will also make it easier for users
to understand when they’re communicating with a business by changing the color
of the text bubbles when engaging with brands.
But the bigger announcement, most notably for larger
scale organizations, is that WhatsApp will also be introducing new, paid tools to help organizations make better use
of the platform.
As explained by WhatsApp:
“We're building
and testing new tools via a free WhatsApp Business app for small companies and
an enterprise solution for bigger companies operating at a large scale with a
global base of customers, like airlines, e-commerce sites, and banks. These
businesses will be able to use our solutions to provide customers with useful
notifications like flight times, delivery confirmations, and other updates.”
Note: The tool for smaller businesses will be free,
while the enterprise version will be paid.
The notifications sound very much like those available within
Facebook Messenger, which were updated only recently to incorporate a range of new prompts. These updates will
enable businesses to stay in touch with WhatsApp users with various push
notifications, which, given the app’s usage, will no doubt be very enticing,
dependent on how the actual monetization process works.
Offering improved business options is the next logical step for
WhatsApp. At Facebook’s annual stockholder
meeting in
June last year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussed their monetization strategy
for the messaging app, and all of their tools, detailing how the company
follows a three-stage process for monetization:
ü Build a product that
people love
ü Facilitate organic
business behavior on the app (free of charge)
ü Prove additional
avenues for businesses who are seeking to expand their reach and presence
Over the past year, both Messenger and WhatsApp have been moving
through that second stage and into the third, which is where this latest
announcement clearly sits.
Facebook’s likely to take a more gentle approach with WhatsApp
than it has with Messenger, given their previous stance that they wouldn’t put ads in WhatsApp for fear of
degrading the user experience. But at a billion daily actives and rising, and
with $19 billion in investment, Facebook needs to
start converting that attention to real dollars. And given they already ditched
the $0.99 sign-up fee back in 2014, they need to find alternatives somewhere in between.
That doesn’t mean they won’t ever put ads into WhatsApp, that
they won’t slip sponsored messages in between WhatsApp Status sequences or charge
for push notifications to certain users, but they’ll likely explore every other
option first. And if they want these new enterprise tools to pay off, they’ll
need to offer some significant incentives for big businesses to pay a fee to
reach their audience.
But then again, with a billion daily actives, they do have a
wide range of opportunities to consider, with no shortage of interested brands.
The new WhatsApp business tools will be rolling out soon.
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