A messaging app will overtake Facebook by end of next year

Photo by Microsiervos Geek Crew

Facebook is getting old. Within 18 months, a mobile messaging app will overtake the social network to become the world’s most active social platform.

That’s the bold prediction coming from Simon Kemp, Asia managing partner of We Are Social, who spoke at the recent #ThinkPH 2016 conference organized by Philippine news site Rappler in Manila.

While he wouldn’t name which messaging app it was, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger come closest to Facebook in terms of active users.

Facebook has 1.7 billion monthly active users, while Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp have more than a billion each.

Why the sudden shift? Simon cites a few reasons: chat apps are akin to real-life conversations, they’re free to use – therefore less demanding on data plans, and they’re not cluttered with advertisements.

Can’t buy into people’s convos

Even if that’s the case, Facebook isn’t really going any time soon – after all, it owns both WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.

But what does it mean for businesses? This is where it gets tricky.

“We cannot track conversations [in apps] the way we used to be able to with things like Facebook and Twitter. These are not public conversations, and the beauty about public conversations is we could learn about people, we could see what they were interested in, we could learn about their motivations, and we could dig deeper in their natural conversations with their consent,” Simon says.

That essentially means it will now be harder for brands to advertise.

So an ad campaign’s success no longer depends on “likes”, engagement, or impressions – metrics that are “gameable.”

Instead, “we now need to think about organic word of mouth. This is going back to the good old days of marketing as it was in the 11th century when good news and bad news spread face to face. We’re doing that now through these messaging apps,” Simon explains.

“This is how social media is changing. It’s no longer about buying impressions,” he continues. “We can no longer, in this chat app-driven world, create mediocre content and stick a hell load of ads behind it and say, ‘look we got high engagement.’ We have to change.”

What brands can do