One-to-One Messaging

Where does the world go when social media is no longer exciting? Enter one-to-one messaging.
Over the past few years individuals, brands and businesses have been plunging all their efforts into social media. This of course happened once the broad realization hit that social media wasn’t some fleeting trend reserved for young or digital-obsessed people, but rather a meaningful and, more crucially, unmissable way to connect with target audiences and demographics.
But the both exciting and vexing thing about the online world is just how quickly, unpredictably, and organically it changes. You’d be hard pressed to find a major brand that’s not on social media today, and because of that the marketplace has become quite crowded, almost blasé. Younger demographics and innovators naturally look elsewhere to direct their attention. Enter the rise of one-to-one messaging platforms.
There is a slew of statistics to support the assertion that one-to-one messaging apps are taking over broadcast-style networks like Facebook and Twitter. Forbes reports that “more than 2.5 billion people regularly use a messaging app, a number that will grow to 3.5 billion within 2 years.” Even more convincingly, data from Business Insider shows that activities on messaging apps like WhatsApp, Line, WeChat, Facebook Messenger and the like have surpassed activity on the “big four” social media networks.
Signs of this shift have been building up for some time. One of the most compelling indicators has been young people’s (especially the teenage demographic) preference for using the ephemeral messaging system Snapchat over more evergreen platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. As teens have grown up with social media as a staple, they see value in talking to their friends and contacts in a less public, more intimate way. They are both aware and wary of the fact that what you post online today will still be around years from now (something that the early adopters of Facebook rarely considered) because they’ve witnessed the negative repercussions, so they would rather use platforms that are less public and less everlasting.
So what does this mean for brands? Will companies be using these apps in the future to directly speak to their customers. Commentator Chris Messina certainly thinks so. Writing for Mashable, he has dubbed 2016 as the “year of conversational commerce” – that is brands using these one-to-one messaging platforms to speak to their consumers in a more direct way than ever before. He writes that “The net result is that you and I will be talking to brands and companies over Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, and elsewhere before year’s end, and will find it normal.”
Another driver of this trend is the large-scale shift to mobile. Messaging apps, with their lack of clutter and noise, are a perfect fit for mobile platforms and people are increasingly using their mobile devices to do a larger portion of their computing and communicating. As Forbes reports, “messaging apps dominate mobile, currently accounting for 6 of the top 10 most used apps globally.”
Every week it seems that messaging apps like Slack, Line, Viber, Facebook Messenger and the rest are rolling out new features to increase the ways in which they can be used in an attempt to grab more of their users’ screen time. WhatsApp recently dropped its $1 annual fee and introduced encryption, while Facebook Messenger increasingly tries to position itself as a stand-alone app, with functionality including voice calls and money transfer.
But just as many brands dragged their heels on the uptake of using social as a primary advertising and engagement platform, it remains to be seen if they will have learned their lesson and will pivot to messaging apps before, those too, are replaced by something else.

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