WhatsApp has been one of the fastest-growing social media phenomenons of 2015, growing by an astonishing 100 million users since April this year. The instant messaging app was purchased by social media giant Facebook in 2014 and has gone from strength to strength since, currently boasting 900 million monthly users across the world.
This figure places WhatsApp ahead of Facebook Messenger, with 700 million users, and way out in front of Twitter, with roughly 300 million monthly users. However, these figures only indicate active monthly users, which could simply mean someone who looks at their WhatsApp once a month rather than actively using it on a regular basis, so it’s hard to know just how often all these active users are actually using the app to send and receive messages.
The growing base of WhatsApp users opens up some interesting questions about how businesses could use the platform to their advantage. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has stated that they want to see people organically interacting with businesses using WhatsApp, but it remains to be seen exactly how this will happen. Whatever takes place, this story demonstrates how more and more social media opportunities are coming up all the time for businesses and individuals across the world to enjoy using, and we look forward to seeing how companies incorporate new social media into their marketing campaigns.