You will soon start seeing a lot more sponsored messages in Facebook Messenger. The company today announced that it’s opening up the sponsored messages platform to all advertisers, it was previously testing out the platform with a select group of brands and advertisers. This will enable advertisers to reach more people through Messenger and it’s also going to open up a new revenue stream for the company as it looks for new ways to monetize the one billion-plus strong community that uses Messenger to stay in touch with their family and friends.
Facebook’s vice president of product for Messenger David Marcus made this announcement today at the Web Summit conference in Lisbon. All advertisers will now be able to send sponsored messages on the platform.
Facebook will place some controls on this so that users don’t feel like they are being spammed by advertisers all the time. For example, businesses won’t be able to send sponsored messages to a user if that user hasn’t already opened a conversation thread with that business, this means that you won’t be receiving sponsored messages from businesses that you have never interacted with before.
However, there are countless ways that a business can get in a conversation with you on Facebook. It could be through interaction with a bot, through a subscription for some updates or through a response to a Facebook News Feed ad. Users will also be able to block sponsored messages if they no longer want to receive them from any particular business.
Since the sponsored messages platform has just now been opened up to all advertisers, it’s going to be a while before you start receiving them from businesses you’ve started a thread with, so if you don’t want to be bothered by them you can start by cleaning up those unused threads you have with any and all businesses in Facebook Messenger.
Filed in . Read more about Facebook and Facebook Messenger. Source: techcrunch