Facebook is rolling out a marketing tool for brands to promote their business with verified business profiles on WhatsApp.

In September this year, WhatsApp introduced verified business profiles to set up their presence on the messaging service that Facebook bought for $19 billion in 2014. Now, Facebook, with its latest feature, paves way for businesses to kick-start conversations on WhatsApp.

Facebook announced this Wednesday, that businesses can now add a link button of their WhatsApp business profile to their ads running on Facebook. These link buttons would be WhatsApp-specific, similar to what Facebook introduced last year and expanded to Instagram earlier this year.

Pancham Gajjar, Facebook’s product marketing manager, said “Many people already use WhatsApp to communicate with small businesses. It’s a fast, convenient way to stay in touch. By adding a click-to-WhatsApp button to Facebook ads, businesses can now make it even easier for people to learn about their products, set up an appointment or use their service”.

Only WhatsApp users would be able to see the WhatsApp-enabled ads on Facebook. The ads would be standard News Feed ads, but with a ‘send message’ button with the WhatsApp logo. Hitting the button would redirect you to WhatsApp, with a pre-formatted message by the business for a person to send to the business. You may edit the message before sending it. The message will be delivered along with the Facebook ad’s image, so that the receiver may recognize the brand responsible for sending the message.

Have a look at how it would work:

Now Link Facebook Ads To WhatsApp Accounts

The way to buy click-on-WhatsApp ads is by boosting an organic page post and selecting a menu option to add the click-to-WhatsApp button. Currently, brands cannot get to them through Facebook’s self-serve ad-buying tool or its advertising API. As a result, ads cannot be pinpointed to users, as was the case in Facebook’s click-to-Messenger ads. However, businesses can still target the ads with Facebook’s standard ad-aiming options like age, gender, location, interests, behavior, demographics and other categories.

Facebook aims to reach a wider audience and raise people’s awareness of business on WhatsApp, by leveraging ads in Facebook’s news feed. Although the feature already existed for Facebook Messenger, but advertising industry executives believe in WhatsApp’s potential to cover a wider audience as compared to Messenger. WhatsApp is more convenient, chat-friendly, and available for a global audience.

Now that the feature is available, its time to make the users aware that it is open for business.

Author

Ritu from PageTraffic is a qualified Google Ads Professional and Content Head at PageTraffic. She has been the spear head for many successful Search Marketing Campaigns and currently oversees Content Marketing operations of PageTraffic in India.