Are Social Networks Becoming The Infrastructure Of Industry?

IBA Group
Mark Hillary
Social networks have evolved rapidly over the past few years. In the last decade tools like Myspace were primarily used for sharing pictures and messages with friends – the social aspect of the network was the primary reason to use it. Facebook took over and sharing cat videos remained an extremely popular pastime.

But now companies are using these same networks to interact with customers. Brands got used to watching out for content on blogs and then the review sites, as well as tweets and Facebook. The past half a decade or so has seen an enormous change in the way that corporate and customer relationships work and it looks like Facebook may be about to define the next wave of change.

The Facebook Messenger app has been around for a few years now. It’s a useful tool for keeping in touch with friends and in many ways removes the need to know the phone number of your friends because messages are all relayed through the Facebook system – even though the app functions entirely separately from the main Facebook app.

A new development called “Business on Messenger” is aimed at making the app a hub for customers and companies. Companies will be able to take orders on Messenger, send out order confirmations, send shipping status updates, track deliveries and customers will be able to directly send questions to sellers.

All this functionality will be offered to companies to use in a flexible way that works best for their business. For the customer these developments are welcome. Facebook is encouraging developers to build new apps around the messenger API so it looks like companies will be able to create a complete customer messaging system using the building blocks Facebook makes available.

In some markets the WhatsApp messenger has already become an important tool for brands to talk with customers – and Facebook already owns that app. I fully expect the two messenger services to be blended at some point, with the addition of all these added features that will make this a real hub for customers interacting with companies.

Will companies buy into the service from Facebook? I expect that they will because to build this infrastructure internally is very expensive. The end result is that companies will be able to get a very low cost customer management system, but it will mean that more customers will be tied into using Facebook – whether they want to or not.