WhatsApp breaks silence on its upcoming ‘celebrity feature’

Tech wizards were recently holding series of discussions on speculated ‘WhatsApp for Business’ but little did users know about its background. Now Facebook-owned WhatsApp has confirmed the feature.

According to WhatsApp’s FAQ section’, the messaging platform is now looking for ways to let users connect to businesses easily.

The page claims that WhatsApp is exploring ways for you to communicate with the businesses that matter to you. It also adds that the company has already started verifying business accounts with a green tick badge showing next to its name. The verification means that the company has confirmed the phone number of the account to a business account. The FAQ page also mentions that it will let users know when they can start chatting to the business account via a yellow message inside a chat.

It has also been mentioned that, “there is no way to delete these messages from the chat.” WhatsApp says that if users already have a business’s phone number saved in their address book, the name they see in the name the business has chosen for themselves. Users can also block the business if they don’t want to contact them.

Furthermore it has been revealed that the feature is limited to ‘a small number of businesses participating in a pilot program.’ It is not for sure when exactly the company plans to roll out the feature to wider numbers. While the FAQ page of WhatsApp indicates the implementation of the feature within the main app itself, a separate report from July said that it might launch a new app altogether for businesses.

WaBetaInfo (@wabetainfo), a Twitter account that tracks changes in WhatsApp’s beta builds, said that WhatsApp is working on a new app for small and medium businesses.