According to the New York Times, and the Daily Mail it appears that Facebook have just announced that they intend to merge their Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp apps letting users message one another across all their services.
Although the apps would remain as stand alone entities, this integrated approach would offer better insights into what audiences are really engaging with or responding to from a marketing perspective.
How soon will this take effect?
A project of this nature would probably not be completed until the end of this year or perhaps even in early 2020, so whilst it’s not going to happen very soon, the way you map your content for generating leads and engaging audiences, should be considered.
The changes could for instance enable an encrypted message to be sent from a Facebook account holder to a WhatsApp account holder. Thus making it easier to expand your audience reach cross platforms using single content streams. Messages would be encrypted which protects them from being viewed by anyone except the two participants in the conversation.
Why is this significant for affiliates?
It’s a clear sign that social media cross multiple channels is going to become much easier for online affiliates to manage. It may even help affiliates to expand their audience reach using real time and live content that was traditionally created for just one social media channel.
It will change the way we write content as it can now be applied to multiple apps. It may even make outbound communication and lead generation easier to manage. Over the past few years social platforms have formed insular communities or groups of audiences. As a result, affiliates have had to devise multiple content strategies and communication plans for each separate community of players and across each different platform – this takes up an incredible amount of resource and time to curate.
It will also become easier for people to share, tag, like, promote your content across multiple social platforms. Viral marketing, sharing and liking just becomes a whole lot more interesting to manage. Social media monitoring will become slightly less complex too. there will be less of a barrier to entry for starting conversations about your products, services, brand influencers.
A platform merger of this kind could seriously help social engagement become a lot easier for affiliates who operate player communities, memberships and forums to promote key brands and their own services. It will be easier for them to manage and more efficient to grow alongside their website platforms.
It will take a while to actually happen, but affiliates are always ahead of the curve, so it will be interesting to see if this is a game changer for making digital marketing in social media a lot simpler, more efficient for engaging customers in the right place, at the right time and in the right format.
If you want to find out more about how social media will be evolving in 2019, register now for our Affiliate Bootcamp, and come join us in learning more about how social media marketing, can help power up your affiliate business.
