Facebook is building a unified messaging system for businesses

Social media giant Facebook is reportedly building a unified messaging for business feature that will allow companies to access and manage Instagram Direct messages alongside Facebook Messenger messages.

Last month, The New York Times reported that the company was planning to unite the back-end technology running Instagram, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp on the consumer side. Now though, it appears that Facebook is also building a tool to do the exact same thing with its apps for business.

The company's new feature will add Instagram Direct messaging to the messaging inbox inside the Facebook Pages Manager app on both desktop and mobile. Currently the tool only allows businesses to receive and interact with messages from Facebook Messenger.

End users will be unable to see the difference between a message sent on Instagram and one sent on Facebook Messenger as the function would exist only on the front-end for business page mangers.

Business messaging

Facebook's decision to unite the backed of its three messaging services has the potential to shake up the business messaging space as the company looks to gain a foothold in the growing market.

As users spend more time with its messaging apps, this could help grow its advertising business and while there there are currently no monetization plans for its combined messaging experience, the idea has been discussed by the company.

Facebook's messaging tools are used as a B2B communication platform between vendors and consumers with 150m people using Instagram to talk with businesses and 10bn messages sent between consumers and businesses every month on Facebook Messenger.

As of now, the company has yet to announce anything regarding the possibility of combining Instagram and Facebook Messenger into a unified messaging service but if the rumors are true, we could likely hear an announcement soon.

Via Axios