It looks like the biggest social network in the world is also one of the largest instant messaging providers, with Facebook announcing that it has more than 500 million monthly active users (MAU) on its Facebook Messenger platform.
Facebook Messenger’s user numbers are impressive, but still fall short of the 600 million MAUs that Facebook’s other instant messaging platform WhatsApp, which it purchased for $19 billion (R215 billion) earlier in the year, managed to attract.
Facebook has been on a mission to get its Messenger user numbers up this year and made the call to force its user base to download the standalone app to access their messages as opposed to being able to view them inside of the Facebook app on Android, iOS and Windows Phone and it’s working. Just a little over six months ago Facebook Messenger had just 200 million users showing that even though people didn’t like being forced into making the switch, for the most part they did it anyway.
Facebook Messenger is rumoured to become even more useful in the coming months as code has been found that points to a mobile payment feature being added that will allow users to transfer money to their friends from within the Messenger app.
With more than 1.3 billion users on Facebook every month it becomes difficult to discount any move that the social media giant makes. And with hundreds of millions of users on its messaging platforms as well Facebook is well positioned to be the defacto communications provider for much of the world.
[Source – Facebook]
