Unless you’ve spent the last week under a rock, you’re probably aware that Facebook has purchased Instant Messaging (IM) platform WhatsApp for an almighty $19bn (£11.4) – the largest sum Facebook has, to date, paid to pave the way to world domination acquire another company. Facebook is clearly making a big push in the mobile market and in fact, following the acquisition, it announced that Facebook Messenger for Windows and Firefox would cease to exist from 3rd March, indicating just how hard and fast that push is. This is where WhatsApp comes in – it will provide Facebook with millions of mobile users across the globe – 465m in fact. When you think about it, WhatsApp really is phenomenal. It has 320 million daily active users; 19bn messages are sent on the platform each day and 34bn are received. Not only is this a pretty magnificent feat in only 5 years of existence, its PR and marketing budget is $0, so it’s purely been advertised through word-of-mouth.
It is clear why Facebook wanted it, why wouldn’t it? But could the move prove to be a turn-off WhatsApps current user-base? I, for one, am a big WhatsApp advocate – the only people I text now are my parents and even that isn’t really necessary as they both have WhatsApp, it just feels weird. Facebook and I, however, do not get on terribly well anymore and it has crossed my mind to get rid of it altogether. So I’m torn. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? It appears I am not the only one pondering this conundrum – rival messaging app Telegram signed-up 1 million new users within two days of the announcement being made. A lot of this will be to do with the fear that Facebook will do the usual and push advertising across the platform in order to monetise it. But a lot of it will also be to do with contempt for Facebook. In 2013, while most social networking sites were seeing a pretty healthy increase in users, Facebook saw a 3 percent decline.
Everything that can be done on Facebook can also be done elsewhere, but on separate platforms. One would assume that in a constantly moving world consumers would want a single platform by which to conduct all of their social networking, but it appears this isn’t the case and users are, in fact, drawn to different networks for their different needs. If this is the case, then it would probably be best for Facebook to leave WhatsApp well alone and avoid integrating it into the fabric of the social network. I, for one, wouldn’t be using WhatsApp in quite the same way if it became embedded in Facebook, and I’m sure I’m not alone in that.
Comments