Facebook has launched a new app to let small business owners manage pages and profiles across Facebook, Messenger and Instagram, COO Sheryl Sandberg announced in a blog post on Thursday.
The app, called Facebook Business Suite, will consolidate the three apps so small business owners can receive messages from customers, alerts and notifications in one unified inbox.
The company confirmed to The Verge that it plans to add integration with WhatsApp as well in the future.
The app will also allow small businesses to post to Facebook and Instagram at the same time and provide insights into how ad campaigns are performing on the platforms.
Note that there is a similar feature in the publishing functions for administrators of Instagram business accounts linked to Facebook pages.
Integrating these services was on Facebook’s to-do list last year, and the New York Times reported that the company plans to merge the messaging capabilities of WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger together in one place, while keeping all three apps as separate apps.
Last month, there was information about merging Instagram and Facebook Messenger chats, but this is the first official announcement of such a feature designed specifically for small business owners.
Of course, Facebook’s hints that it might merge its messaging apps raised concerns among antitrust regulators. As part of a 2019 report on Facebook’s privacy practices, the European Parliament warned that the social media giant’s plan to merge its messaging poses a potential threat to competition. “The risks of such data sharing are growing significantly, given the news that by early 2020, Facebook plans to merge the technical infrastructure of Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp, which includes… Among them are more than 2.6 billion users,” the report said.
Along with the new business app, Facebook released the third edition of its ongoing research into how small businesses are managing during the coronavirus pandemic and a research study commissioned by Deloitte on consumer purchasing patterns.
Forty-eight percent of consumers surveyed said they had increased their online spending since the outbreak began, and 73 percent of those who began patronizing new businesses during the pandemic said at least one was a small business.
So Facebook plans to make the business tool available to small businesses first and roll it out to larger companies in the future.
