On Monday, Facebook investors decided that they will be giving another term to the company’s eight directors, including the co-founder of LinkedIn, Peter Thiel, whose role in the company was put under scrutiny following his public support for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
Mark Zuckerberg was also among the executives in the room together with the investors during the company’s annual general meeting. The meeting did not just bring in a second term for the eight executives, but it also had them answering questions from investors with respect to the future of WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger – the company’s leading messaging apps.
WhatsApp has over a billion users while Facebook Messenger has about 100 million less. This is huge for a company that has more than 1.6 billion people on its main social media platform as well as another 400 million on Instagram. However, there is still a lot to do as far as monetizing these services is concerned.
Facebook paid over $20 billion to acquire WhatsApp back in 2014. At the time, Messenger wasn’t the go-to app as it is turning out to be. There were even speculations that Zuckerberg’s plan was to eliminate competition by swallowing it. However, the tech mogul was adamant that these two services are worlds apart. Where WhatsApp is a utilitarian chat app, Facebook Messenger lets users bring out their emotions in the best ways possible. He also confirmed that there is no plan of merging these two chat apps, despite the fact that they have their own similarities in terms of offerings.
The Facebook chief also claims that WhatsApp is still very young in terms of messaging services, however, there is a lot of hope in the future with respect to the app’s monetization efforts. In his view, building a consumer behavior is the most basic step. This can then be followed by building organic business behavior.
The Zuck thinks that Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp are now in their second stage. Right after building consumer behavior, the company feels that it’s now time to build organic business behavior. With this in mind, the Facebook CEO is adamant that users of these chat apps will soon be able to send a message to a restaurant or company to make a reservation or ask a question about something, a product for example.
In essence, the company wants to monetize the interactions between users and companies on both Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp.