Earlier this week, Facebook announced that they will be rolling out advertisements globally to their mobile messaging application – Messenger. The feature was already available but only in Australia and Thailand as it is still in its testing phase. After getting good feedback, the company has decided to roll out the update to everyone using messenger.
Facebook messenger wasn’t really monetized until now. So this a way for Facebook to gain some revenue from the 1.2 billion monthly users that the chat application has. This gives marketers and businesses a new channel for them to advertise their products and services. Facebook has been a good marketing channel so assuming that they will carry over the same principles to their chat app, ads that users will see will be relevant and not annoying.
The advertisements will show up on the same screen that shows your messages. However, there will be a dedicated section after 4-5 of your most recent chats. The section will be labelled “sponsored” and will feature the ad that you can click to and it will open in the built in browser of Facebook Messenger.
In addition to the digital adverts that will come up in messenger, businesses will also be able to use other existing Messenger advertising solutions. These are the following:
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Open conversations with click-to-Messenger adverts
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Manage conversations within the versatile Messenger platform
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Re-engage those conversations using sponsored messages
As a business, advertising on Messenger will be a good move as you will be able to get people to see your products right when they’re active. As a user though, I’m not clear how these ads will be tailored to me, will they use data from my Facebook profile or will they actually scan my messages. For example if I happen to be talking about sneakers, will an advert relating to that show up? If so, then it might end up being another violation of privacy.
Tell us what you think. Do you like adverts? Do you use Facebook Messenger and how will this affect your use of the app? Given how Facebook owns WhatsApp, could ads come to the app and if they do will you still use it?
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