Rich Rao of Meta – Messaging even more important to SMBs for building relationships with customers

One on One Interviews

There’s a lot of announcements coming out this week with this being National Small Business Week. And a number of them came from Meta, including things like: • Native Ad Creation: Businesses can now leverage native ad creation in WhatsApp Business App and no longer need to switch apps to complete them • Quote Request on Instagram. People can now request a quote from select businesses on Instagram, following a questionnaire that appears before starting a conversation. • Marketing Messages in MBS: Meta is testing a new capability that will allow businesses to send promotional message campaigns via Messenger to customers who opt in • Unified Inbox Coming to WhatsApp: Meta is also testing the integration of WhatsApp to Inbox in Meta Business Suite, with the goal of making it easier for businesses to save time by managing their conversations with customers across Meta apps in one place and allowing multiple people at the business to manage messages from the same WhatsApp number on multiple devices To get some additional insight into some of these announcements, I had a LinkedIn Live conversation earlier this week with Rich Rao, Vice President of Small Business for Meta.