Ask not what WhatsApp can do for Facebook

Facebook’s most recent acquisition caused a shockwave Wednesday night, as Facebook acquisitions (or acquisition attempts) often do: the company bought the messaging app WhatsApp for $16 billion in stocks and cash, with an additional $3 billion in stock that will vest over the next four years. The $1 billion that the company paid for Instagram nearly a year ago pales in comparison.

The prevailing interpretation is that Facebook is bringing a competitor to its own Messenger app and services under control. Its shift toward messaging over service as a social network has been a long time coming. But an acquisition by Facebook is a savvy move if WhatsApp wants to expand even more quickly than it already has, beyond its 450 million users into areas where other messaging apps have already taken hold. The many people discussing the acquisition last night demonstrated the gap that Facebook needs to fill.

Shortly after the news broke, Twitter overflowed with tweets from people complaining about the relative obscurity of the newly minted, multi-billion dollar company, despite its multi-million-person user base. Some claimed never to have heard of it. Others claimed to know about it, or to have the app installed, but no one they know uses it. Still more said they use it, but only with friends who are abroad, since the app can circumvent international SMS charges and is popular in many countries besides the US.

Indeed, there are many messaging apps, and they are popular in relatively disparate sections of the country or among different demographics. WhatsApp is strong in the US as well as Brazil, Mexico, and India; WeChat tops the chart in China; Kik and Snapchat are popular among teens.

On being the same in different places

Part of the problem with the bevy of cheap, easily available chat apps is that it’s hard to get various social circles to agree on the same one. Four years ago, I personally laughed at a friend who tried to get me to install WhatsApp because it allowed cross-platform iOS-to-Android chatting. Now, I have several messaging apps installed, and I talk to disparate groups on each. For one group of friends, and different subsets of that group, I have WhatsApp chats; for another group I Facebook-message; another contingent is active on Snapchat; another I text. There is precious little overlap between them.

There could be more overlap between the apps than I realize, more friends or even groups of friends on WhatsApp than I have bothered to find. But for the most part, it seems like one group settles on one way of communicating and that sticks. It’s very difficult to get those friends to change.

While WhatsApp has profound engagement and monthly user numbers, it could be bigger still. So could any messaging app—in functionality, they are similar enough—if they could get enough traction to get social circles to agree on them as the platform of choice. They need some sort of unifying feature, something that will draw users in that those users have in common, something that around a billion people are already involved in.

Something like Facebook

Facebook has proven itself as a master of conquest, getting people to sign up by virtue of the fact that all their friends had, too. In the movie The Social Network, character/Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg demonstrates this by laying out to character/Napster founder Sean Parker how he insinuated Facebook as the social network of choice at Baylor University, back when Facebook had fewer than 75,000 members:

MARK: We wanted Baylor in Texas, but Baylor already had network on campus, so instead of going right after them, we made a list of every school within a hundred miles—
SEAN: —and put theFacebook on those campuses first.
MARK: Pretty soon all the Baylor kids were seeing their friends on our site we were in.
SEAN: That’s called the Little Big Horn; that’s smart, Mark.

Facebook has already promised to lay off of WhatsApp and give it its independence, insofar as it has done for Instagram. Likewise, WhatsApp has promised to “remain autonomous and operate independently.” Facebook isn’t going to do anything for WhatsApp by taking control.

It would not be surprising for Facebook to offer not just its canny tactics for conquering mindshare, but the tendrils of existing accounts that it already has in place for most of the connected world. Those tendrils could be a distinct advantage to the crowded and largely homogeneous messaging app market. It’s an edge that none of them really have, a way to easily build when their competitors are so similar and when popularity spikes across demographics are difficult to control.