Facebook COO, Sherly Sandberg recently announced the launch of a new app, “Facebook Business Suite”. A formal announcement of the “Facebook Business Suite” app was made in a blog post on Thursday.
Facebook Business Suite to combine back end infrastructure of three messaging apps
The Business Suite app will allow small business owners to manage pages and profiles across Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram. It will combine the back end infrastructure of the three apps so that the business owners can receive messages from customers, alerts, and notifications in one common inbox. Facebook has also confirmed to integrate Whatsapp to the inbox in the future.
Business Suite app available first to small business with later release to large businesses
It will also allow small business owners to post to Facebook and Instagram at once and receive insights about how ad campaigns are performing across platforms. Currently, this functionality is already present on Instagram business accounts that are linked to Facebook pages.
It has been a while since the social media giant planned to combine the messaging capabilities of all three platforms namely Whatsapp, Instagram, and Messenger while keeping them as separate apps. In February 2019, Axios had reported that Facebook was preparing a unified messaging app for small businesses. The company has planned to first make the app available to small businesses and then roll out to large businesses in the future.
Security concerns raised over the unified messaging app by antitrust regulators
Want to publish your own articles on DistilINFO Publications?
Send us an email, we will get in touch with you.
The European Parliament had expressed their concerns in a 2019 report on Facebook’s privacy practices. It notified that the company’s plan to integrate messaging across platforms poses a potential threat to its competition. The report stated that once the infrastructure of Messenger, Instagram, and Whatsapp is integrated, the data sharing risks will increase extensively, owing to 2.6 billion users.
Facebook releases findings of a research that studied small businesses during COVID-19
Facebook also released the findings of its ongoing research that studied how small businesses are managing during the coronavirus pandemic along with research it commissioned with Deloitte about consumer purchasing patterns.
As per the survey, 48 percent of the customers say that they have increased their online spend during the pandemic, and 73 percent who patronized new businesses during the pandemic stated that at least one of them was a small business.
