Facebook Planning to Let Businesses Contact You Via Whatsapp

A report claims that Facebook is considering opening up Whatsapp to let businesses send messages and contact users directly. This business-consumer interaction is intended to be paid for by businesses that wish to use the platform to reach potential customers.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had earlier stated, last year, that there was no immediate plans to monetise Whatsapp. However Bloomberg reports that Whatsapp might use some of the functions being currently tested on Facebook’s Messenger especially the ones for business – consumer interaction.

The report quotes Facebook’s chief financial officer, David Wehner, who was recently speaking at the JPMorgan technology conference, “We think that enabling B2C [business-to-consumer] messaging has good business potential for us. As we learn those things, I think there’s going to be opportunities to bring some of those things to WhatsApp, but that’s more long-term than the near-term.”

It is not clear how users of the most popular messaging app in the world will react if this gets implemented on Whatsapp but Facebook could easily make money from business in return for allowing them contact users.

Facebook had earlier bought Whatsapp for $22 billion at a time when Whatsapp had 450 million users. It currently has 800 million monthly active users.