In the past couple of weeks we have been hearing a lot about Facebook's plans of introducing ads on WhatsApp. And now, the company has officially revealed its plans of bringing adverstisements to one of the world's most popular social messaging apps i.e. WhatsApp.
"WhatsApp will bring Stories Ads in its status product in 2020," media head at Be Connect Agency, Oilivier Ponteville tweeted. He was attending Facebook Marketing Summit in Rotterdam, Netherland.
According to Ponteville, Facebook would display ads in WhatsApp just as it does in Instagram Stories. This means that ads would be displayed in WhatsApp Stories. More importantly, ads in WhatsApp Stories, just like their Instagram counterparts, would cover all of the screen and that a link would redirect the users to the website.
Interestingly, the image shared by Ponteville announcing the news of ads coming to WhatsApp Stories reveals far more interesting details than just that. If you dig deeper into the image, you would understand that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was kidding when he said that in the days to come his company would be all about interoperability. In this case the implementation is quite simple. Both Facebook and Instagram would get greater integration with WhatsApp. In the days to come, ads and sponsored posts on Facebook and Instagram would feature a link that would allow users to send a direct message to the corresponding business. This feature would appear in the form of a thin band in white blow the Facebook posts and in blue in the Instagram posts - allowing businesses to expand their reach to a wider audience.
It is worth noting that the news of Facebook planning to roll out ads to Facebook Stories was first revealed by social media commentrator Matt Navarra last week.
In addition to this, WhatsApp would also get richer messaging formats. This would allow businesses to share images, text and PDF in a single message.
Lastly, Facebook would integrate WhatsApp's product catalogue with the already existing Facebook catalogue. But that's not the end. Facebook is also testing a new feature that would allow businesses to send their entire product catalogue to their customers in chats enabling businesses, especially the ones that don't have any websites, to showcase the products that they have to their customers.