Facebook Will Soon Enable Businesses to Create Facebook Ads Within WhatsApp's Business Tools

A new article on Social Media Today reports that with Facebook working to make WhatsApp a more all-encompassing tool for business and personal use, it's also looking to provide more promotional tools for brands on WhatsApp, in order to raise awareness of their connection options via message.



But there are no ads in WhatsApp, given ads in direct messaging threads are hated by most people (and ads in WhatsApp Status have also been canned). So instead, Facebook's looking to provide a new option for businesses on WhatsApp, which will enable them to create Facebook promotions within their WhatsApp business tools that link back to their WhatsApp presence, tapping into the combined popularity of the two platforms.

While brands have been able to create Facebook ads that link back to WhatsApp for a long time, they had to go through Facebook's Ad Manager to do that. The new process will provide that within WhatsApp itself. This from CNN:

"Business users will now be able to select an item from their catalog and quickly turn it into a Facebook or Instagram ad with a button directing viewers back to their WhatsApp profile."

That effectively opens up fresh cross-promotional potential for businesses on WhatsApp - which reportedly has around 70 million users in the US alone, while Facebook has more than 200 million, so that's a lot of crossovers. In India, WhatsApp is massively popular, having some 459 million active users. Facebook has 320 million Indian users - which also means many Indian WhatsApp users are not reachable via Facebook.

I have to be totally honest here. Aside from anything else and this being an additional method for marketers, I'm just glad there won't be actual ads on WhatsApp - when news of this development started to break, I was filled with dread!