WhatsApp Is Now On Status

And it’s the coolest thing ever!

I know I am not the only person who wakes up and immediately checks their phone. Millions of us do it every single morning. I bet checking our phones is also the last thing most of us do before we fall asleep.

I usually check my phone first thing in the morning to see whether I might have missed any communication while I was asleep. As a person who loathes phone calls and communicates mostly via texting, and mainly through WhatsApp, checking the App is a thing I do consistently for my morning routine.

I was surprised today morning when I saw a green status on the status list on my WhatsApp. I wondered who it was that might have saved their number on my phone as I hadn’t saved anyone as “WhatsApp”.

Turns out, it’s the App itself that devised this clever way of disseminating information to its two billion users globally.

I think it’s genius! And I wonder why it even took them so long.

Pro’s

Sending status through an official line will help WhatsApp disseminate information to their users in an easy, fast and efficient manner. Lots of us usually check the statuses of our contact lists on the regular and the green, pronounced WhatsApp icon will be hard to miss. Lots of people will click on it.

Also, It will be easier for the administrators to monitor the reach of the information they send as the statuses will show how many people have seen them in real-time.

Cons

The only issue I found is that the WhatsApp statuses do not allow for responding which curtails the giving of feedback to whatever information is on the status.

I do hope in the future when the information contained in the statuses expands and diversifies, the app administrators will allow room to receive feedback. After all, why give out information if you do not create room to hear what the audience of this information has to say about it?

Also for people that might not want to receive information from WhatsApp, providing a mute option would be useful.

Opportunities

Advertising

A while back, I had started seeing adverts on my WhatsApp feed and that did not sit well with me. I mean, they are ads everywhere on the internet! On every single app that you are on. WhatsApp was the only place you could come and be safe from all the marketing.

As an entrepreneur, I respect the hustle and I understand the need for someone to want to get the word out there about their products, but WhatsApp was kinda sacred. It’s my personal space really and I felt like it was being violated when it got infiltrated with unsolicited ads.

Lots of people in my circle were complaining about it too. I guess the trouble with it was not the advertisements exactly, but the manner in which they were being disseminated.

I and many WhatsApp users that I know have already saved the phone numbers of some retail outlets that we keep up with. We also usually check their status updates on the regular to see the products that they have on sale as many outlets use their WhatsApp status updates as marketing tools.

Seeing other unsolicited ads on my WhatsApp was annoying as to me, it was an overload of marketing in my safe space.

Now that WhatsApp has its own status channel of communicating with their users, they can create another channel purposefully for advertisements.

They could call it WhatsApp marketing and they could post at least five to ten ads in five to ten status updates daily to reach their two billion global users.

I noticed that viewers only watch a limited number of stories in statues. The more stories a person posts in a day, the less the views for the last stories. So, limiting the number of statuses in a day could be useful to help maximize the reach per status.

With an organized way of advertising on the app, a WhatsApp user will not feel like their space is being intruded on like they did when random ads showed up in their chat lists.

As users will be aware that they will be viewing ads by clicking on the WhatsApp marketing status, they might even welcome the well-organized advertising. By viewing the status updates at their own free will, they will be in a way consenting to have ads on their WhatsApp.

The limited space for advertising on WhatsApp marketing status will drive the cost of advertising with them up and this will prove lucrative to WhatsApp and Facebook its parent company.

Also, they could target adverts based on location to give users a more centralized experience and to maximize advertising revenue.

Promotion of causes

Just like Google promotes causes with its doodles on its home page, WhatsApp could promote causes through its statuses.

They could disseminate information on Martin Luther King Day, Black History Month, Christmas, Easter, and other holidays, celebrations, and commemorations.

They could also create special channels on special circumstances such as during floods, fires, wars, and other disasters to share useful information to its users.

They could do so by creating another status and call it WhatsApp Causes or WhatsApp cares.

Other permanent channels such as statues dedicated to motivational quotes, investments quotes, help to people suffering from depression and other illnesses, etc could be started.

With two billion users from all over the globe currently, their reach on these issues through their channels would be huge and impactful.

This way, they could also use their platforms for positivity and to help improve the daily lives of their users.

User friendly

As a person who was kinda shocked by a strange status update showing up on my WhatsApp, it would be important and useful for WhatsApp to give users the choice of opting in or opting out to receiving status updates from their official channels moving forward.

I did notice that on their current statuses, they do not give mute options so far like they do in the statuses of the people in user contact lists.

By doing so, they will be allowing people the opportunity to consent to or to deny receiving information from them.

I look forward to seeing where WhatsApp will go with this. But so far, I can tell that good thing are on the way.