WhatsApp Business has grown to over 200 million monthly users over the past few years. That means there are tons of businesses sending messages to users — and some of these messages could be considered as spam. For customers, the only option was to either let them send messages and offers, or block the business account altogether. WhatsApp is finally changing that.
The company is now testing new ways for users to provide feedback to businesses about what kind of messages they would want to receive — or not receive. This involves buttons like “interested/not interested” and “stop/resume” for some specific categories of messages.
Meta said it will begin testing interactions globally. For example, in the screenshot below, users can indicate whether they are interested (or not interested) in receiving “offers and announcements”. They can also choose to stop receiving this type of message altogether. In the future, users will have the option to resume messages if they wish to receive offers from a brand during a festive season.
Businesses can send messages through WhatsApp’s API based on one of these four categories: marketing (offers, new products), utility (order updates, account balance), authentication (one-time passwords) and service (customer inquiries).
While these categories exist in the backend, there was previously no way for customers to stop one type of message while continuing to receive others. For instance, you might want to receive purchase updates and authentication codes from an e-commerce site, but if you weren’t interested in marketing messages, you didn’t have the option to provide that feedback manually.
In countries like India and Brazil, a phone number attached to WhatsApp is the primary communication channel for many users, unlike email. While on email, you get an option to unsubscribe from promotional emails, there weren’t such indicators on WhatsApp. This resulted in users being overwhelmed by spammy business messages.
The company has been considering introducing new controls for business messaging. In a conversation with TechCrunch in September on the sidelines of a WhatsApp Business event in India, Nikila Srinivasan, VP of product management for messaging monetization at Meta, hinted at this feature.
“One important thing we do is to give you transparency that you are interacting and engaging with businesses. Two, if you don’t want to interact with them, the strongest signal you can send is to block them and report them. This helps us understand that this is not a business you want on the platform. In addition to that, we are starting to think about how we can give more preferences to users to express more granularity,” she said.
Srinivasan also mentioned that educating businesses and helping them understand how some of their campaigns are not meeting the platform or users’ standards will eventually reduce spam.
Earlier this year, the company started restricting the number of marketing messages a person can receive in a day without explicitly defining the limit.
For a long time, WhatsApp marketed itself as a place for people to have personal conversations. Over the last few years, the company has introduced features to build and join communities, to broadcast messages as a creator or publisher, and, for businesses, to communicate directly with customers. Both communities and broadcast channels have their own tabs in the app.
However, business communication still shows up in the main chat inbox, and there is no way to filter it. In its Q3 2024 quarterly call, the company indicated that the WhatsApp Business platform is a key growth driver for its family of other apps revenue, which raked in $434 million in the quarter. The company will need to find a balance between making money and not alienating core WhatsApp users by bombarding them with business messages.
When we asked about this balance to Srinivasan along with possibility of creating a separate place for business messages, she pointed out that several of the newer WhatsApp features are optional and separate from the main inbox.
“The core of what you want to do with WhatsApp is to be in your inbox. When I think about whether we would create a separate experience for businesses, I really love the inspiration that we have for helping businesses. Whatever we are doing in terms of educating businesses and investing in user controls is because we want the standard of what actually belongs in your inbox to feel really high,” she said.
You can contact this reporter at [email protected] or on Signal: @ivan.42
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Meta is introducing new features for Messenger, its messaging app, including AI-powered noise suppression.
Messenger is getting HD video calls and voice isolation, both of which can be enabled via the call settings menu. HD calls are now the default for calls placed over Wi-Fi, Meta says, and an option for calls over cellular.
Messenger also now lets you leave audio or video voice messages when contacts aren’t available, like a digital voicemail. When someone doesn’t answer a call, you can tap the new “Record message” button to send an audio or video recording.
There’s new Siri integration. On iOS, you can ask Siri to help make calls and messages by asking something like “Hey Siri, send a message to Cassandra on Messenger” and then dictating what that message will be.
Lastly, Meta launched AI backgrounds for video calls, which it previewed earlier in the year. Soon, Meta says, you’ll be able to create AI-generated backgrounds by tapping the “effects” icon in the sidebar during Messenger video calls and selecting “Backgrounds.”
The updates to Messenger come after Meta rolled out a new communities feature for the app, built its Meta AI chatbot into the Messenger search bar, an added tools to share large files. Toward the end of last year, Meta also made end-to-end encryption the default for Messenger conversations.
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As X competitor Bluesky takes off, topping 20 million users, Meta’s own Twitter-like app, Instagram Threads, has begun rolling out a new feature called custom feeds to its global audience. Hoping to capitalize on user demand for more personalization, custom feeds are meant to allow Threads users to easily build feeds around specific topics or those including certain user profiles.
This would make it easier for Threads users to tap into the communities and conversations that are most important to them and could help to challenge Bluesky’s own set of tools for personalization, including those that let users build their own algorithms, feeds, and lists, as well as those that let them configure their own moderation tools.
The global launch of custom feeds on Threads comes only days after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the feature was entering testing. That signals that Threads is moving quickly to topple some of the momentum that Bluesky has recently seen. Since the U.S. elections, Bluesky adoption has soared as users looked for an alternative to the now more right-leaning X, owned by Elon Musk. Other decisions at X have also pushed people to depart, including how it has changed the block feature and its policy around training AI models on user data.
As a result, Bluesky has significantly grown its user base from around 7 million users just a couple of months ago to now north of 20 million.
But Threads retains the lead among the X competitors, with more than 275 million monthly users, largely thanks to its ability to jump-start its network by leveraging Instagram’s social graph and integrations with Meta’s other apps. However, some users on Threads have been disappointed by its decision to deprioritize politics, and have asked for other options beyond the default algorithmic “For You” feed and the chronological “Following” feed.
That’s where custom feeds come in.
To use the feature, you’ll first need to search for and then tap into a topic to see the latest posts. From there, you’ll tap on the three-dot icon next to the search term and choose the option “create new feed.” You can also choose to add specific user profiles to a feed by visiting the user’s profile, tapping the three-dot icon above their profile photo, and then tapping to add them to one of your feeds.
After the feeds are created, they can be pinned to the top of the Threads’ home screen on the web in the columns-based view (similar to Twitter’s Tweetdeck or X Pro), making them easier to access.
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