Meta is determined to push monetizing messaging, in an effort to enable businesses to capitalize on private messaging across its apps. The way people use social media continues to evolve, and there has been a notable change from posting every thought in one’s head to a news feed or public story to private messaging. Meta announced they are looking to lean into this with new features, like monetization of messaging and its recently launched ‘Channels’ broadcast chat element.
In this example, posted by Sachin Shah, Meta’s now testing out a new option that encourages business users to highlight relevant products in chats. It’s unclear if this is limited to business accounts, or if this will be a feature enabled for group chats. But it is clear that Meta will push this feature to businesses to use as a means to promote their products.
Clicking the “Sell products” prompt will take you to a page to quickly list your product.
It does seem like a simplified ad flow, though messaging-specific, which could be another way for brands to lean into the messaging shift, and for Meta to make this more commonplace. Meta says that click-to-messaging ads are one of its fastest-growing ad products. However, Meta has not been able to effectively monetize either Messenger or WhatsApp thus far.
Expect to see many more messaging monetization experiments in the coming months.
