Facebook has hit a major milestone: One billion monthly users are active on Messenger, making it one of the most popular apps in the world.
This achievement illustrates Facebook’s dominance in the mobile arena. The company now owns three apps – Facebook, Messenger and WhatsApp – with at least one billion users each. The company also announced just last month that photo-sharing app Instagram has topped more than 500 million users.
Facebook Messenger has grown quickly since its release as a standalone app in 2011. The platform has added 200 million users since just January.
With the announcement, Facebook also shared user engagement stats that could help attract more brands to the platform. The company said 380 million stickers and 22 million GIFs are sent each day, while 17 billion photos are sent monthly.
Additionally, the company continues to roll out features that give businesses more ways to communicate with customers and prospects. Last year, Messenger launched free VoIP video calling and now 10 percent of all VoIP calls go through Messenger, according to Facebook. The company also recently launched a chatbot feature that enables businesses to buy and sell products and provide customer support through its interface. It now has 18,000 bots.
Debra Aho Williamson, principal analyst at eMarketer, pointed out that there aren’t many ways to advertise on Messenger currently, but that it will have more options soon.
“Facebook is testing a feature called Sponsored Messages with a small group of advertisers,” she said. “They are designed to re-engage users in a conversation they started with a business. Facebook is also testing an ad format in News Feed called Click to Message. Those ads are aimed at getting a user to engage with a business’ Messenger account. As Messenger ramps up the number of marketers on its service, they will need ways to advertise to Messenger’s 1 billion users to drive usage of their bots.”
Williamson also pointed out that brands are likely to start leveraging Instant Articles within Messenger, which Facebook started allowing publishers to do just last week.
“Ads will likely appear in publisher content on Messenger,” she said. “Publishers that are part of Facebook’s Instant Articles program can sell ads in the content they distribute, and this tactic is likely to port over to Messenger.”