Facebook may consider business-to-consumer chat for WhatsApp

Social networking giant Facebook is now considering to allow businesses to interact with WhatsApp users for customer service inquiries and more. With this move, Facebook’s $19 billion acquisition WhatsApp could finally generate some revenue for the company.

Bloomberg reports that, Facebook CFO David Wehner present at a JPMorgan technology conference in Boston said, “We think that enabling that B2C messaging has good business potential for us.” He adds, “As we learn those things, I think there’s going to be opportunities to bring some of those things to WhatsApp, but that’s more longer-term than the near-term.”

No information as been provided as to how Facebook will make money from this property. The report adds that WhatsApp may use B2C (business-to-consumer) interaction that marketers are paying for. These functions are also being tested with Facebook Messenger.

An earlier report points out that the social networking site has also added a ‘send’ button with the familiar WhatsApp icon, as a part of the status actions buttons that appear under each status update. The new button appears on the right side (for left-to-right languages) for some users in the most recent version of the Facebook for Android app. This move appeared to the the first move towards connecting the two platforms in order to sustain growth and take control of the messaging market together. Teams are already working on a deeper integration, that will include the ability to send messages between Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp.