Facebook to Reportedly Combine Business Messaging Services of Messenger, Instagram

Facebook is reportedly planning to roll the business messaging services of Messenger and Instagram together.

According to a new report from Axios citing two sources familiar with the matter, the social network giant is building a unified messaging platform for businesses, allowing them to access and manage both Facebook Messenger and Instagram Direct Messages.

Basically, the new feature would add the Instagram Direct Messages inbox from a given business profile within the Facebook Pages Manager, both on mobile and the web. Currently, businesses can only control messages from Messenger on Facebook and can only respond to comments from Instagram on the Pages Manager app.

According to the report, the function would exist only on the front-end for business page managers — users would not know whether a business is responding through Facebook or Instagram.

The move would allow Facebook to obtain more of a market share in the over business messaging space, increasing time users might spend in its messaging apps. The increased usage would likely bolster Facebook’s advertising business within its messaging services.

As far as monetization goes, Facebook currently has no plans to do so with a potential Facebook Messenger/Instagram Direct business messaging platform, explain the sources.

Just last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced plans to roll the consumer messaging services of WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger together.

The move — which is expected to take at least a full year to complete — is reportedly being done at the request of Zuckerberg, who is planning to bring all of Facebook’s disparate messaging service together using one shared backend. The three services will still work as standalone apps but will be merged so that chats and messages can pass between them.