Facebook’s Instagram is expanding its scope beyond just a photo-sharing app by allowing people to book appointments with businesses.
Users will be able to book appointments for things like haircuts by visiting a company’s profile and tapping a button to schedule such appointments.
Having such a feature expands the means by which Instagram can generate revenue as a promotional tool for businesses, and improve its functionality for its end-users.
While the move many not be a revolutionary addition to Instagram, it signals that the app, under Facebook’s banner, will look to diversify from the world of consumer networking and business promotion, to more meaningful transactions between businesses and consumers.
Given Instagram has some eight million companies with business profiles on its app, it was arguably only a matter of time before Facebook cranked its subsidiary into action to find new ways to monetise its user base, beyond advertising which has grown five-fold over the past year.
Facebook already enables conversations between customers and businesses via its Messenger app and web service.
Social networking sites, such as Facebook, are increasingly pushing beyond being simple sites for sharing views and pictures of brunch to true online platforms for supporting e-commerce, games, apps and other services plugged into them through industrious input from third-party developers.
However, these platforms still make the majority of their revenue from advertising, meaning the additional services are essentially icing on the cake to already lucrative strategies.
Are you a Facebook expert? Take our quiz!
After the United States imposes 100 percent tariffs on certain Chinese goods, Europe widens its…
OpenAI strikes deal with Reddit to train its AI tech on user posts and give…
Global spending spree from Microsoft continues, with huge investment for new data centre to drive…
Workforce blow. Newly privatised Toshiba has embarked on a 'revitalisation plan' that will entail the…
European Commission opens an official child safety investigation into Facebook and Instagram-owner Meta Platforms
Hundreds of AI and cloud engineers are being offered relocation out of China by Microsoft,…