Communit the mysterious feature rumored for WhatsApp: What does this mean for marketers?
Guilherme Rezende
Nov 18, 21 | 5 min read
‘Community’, the mysterious feature rumored for WhatsApp: What does this mean for marketers?
Reading time: 5 minutes
Attention, breaking news in Digital Marketing ! Recently, the XDA Developers portal identified mentions of the word Community in the internal files of the new Beta version of Whatsapp.
Source: XDA Developers
Shortly after, the WABetaInfo website had access to screenshots that reinforce this possibility:
Source: WAbetainfo
What’s next? In this article, we’ll talk about what
to expect from this mysterious new feature and how marketers can benefit from it in their strategies.
After all, what is a Community?
WABetaInfo shows that the mysterious function is about a new space where administrators would have greater powers over groups with the possibility of:
send messages within this group chat;
invite new users through links or QR codes;
create a collection of community-related groups.
Source: WAbetainfo
Another point that draws attention is list of libya consumer email the format of the icon for this new feature, probably to differentiate Groups and Communities. We can see that the icon design is square with rounded edges, different from the circular shape that currently exists.
Why did WhatsApp decide to implement this new feature?
According to Statista , with more than 2 billion monthly users, WhatsApp is the world’s leading instant messaging platform, followed by Facebook Messenger (1.3 billion) and the Chinese network WeChat (1.2 billion).
Source: Statista (2021)
However, so far, the app has shown a clear intention to keep it as a more private communication channel and not to escalate it. In other words: WhatsApp does not want to become vulnerable to large groups or spam messages within the platform.
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By working on a Communities feature, WhatsApp
may be trying to bridge the ever-widening gap between it and other messaging apps like Telegram and Signal.
A good example of this is the limit of 256 users per group that still exists on WhatsApp, a very low figure when compared to its competitor Telegram (up to 200,000 users per group) or Signal (up to 1,000 per group).
There are two other important factors worth considering here.
In early 2021, WhatsApp’s new privacy dharmesh shah: discover the story of the co-founder of hubSpot and inbound marketing legend policy sparked controversy among users over what kind of data could be shared with parent brand Facebook (now Meta), leading to a mass exodus to these other apps.
Another recent development was the sudden crash of the platform along with the entire Facebook app network last month. Telegram gained an incredible 70 million users in just a few hours.
Given such significant data, it is clear by lists that the platform needs to reinvent itself and propose new functionalities while maintaining its sovereignty in the market.