WhatsApp wants to go beyond being just a messaging app and become a comprehensive communications tool from which users can also create, distribute, and read newsletters.
Receiving and reading newsletters has been (until now) associated with email
Newsletters are a type of subscription content that generally arrive via email with topics of interest from companies, groups, media outlets, influencers, or experts in a particular field. They are widely used for information and corporate marketing campaigns. Many people also create their own newsletters through platforms like Medium or Substack.
Now, according to findings in the source code of WhatsApp’s beta versions, the company, owned by Meta, also wants to be a platform for creating, distributing, and reading newsletters.
How to send newsletters on WhatsApp
Although the feature is still in development and not yet available to the app’s 2 billion instant messaging users worldwide, some details are already known about how newsletters will work on WhatsApp when they launch.
This new type will appear in the WhatsApp Status tab and will apparently be called “Newsletters.” There, the option to create a newsletter will appear, in a box.
Thus, the popular instant messaging app will host a new type of content called newsletters, which will be displayed in the Status tab of the app, similar to how you create a group or a community.
You will be able to choose the name of the newsletter, which can be up to 100 characters long. You can also add an image and a description of up to 500 characters. This description will be useful for followers, according to WhatsApp, as it will guide them about the nature and content of the newsletter. As for the image, you can use your own photos, images from your device’s gallery, emojis, or images from the Internet.
Subscribing to WhatsApp newsletters
The contacts of that person will be able to subscribe to their Newsletter to stay up to date with the content that person shares, which will be shown in their Status tab. In a way, the functionality is similar to the new Channels that Instagram is preparing.
WhatsApp newsletters can include images, text, videos… although their format will be different from Status or Group Chats. Newsletters will allow closer communication with small groups of friends and contacts, in a one-way manner, as they will receive the content published by the newsletter creator on their devices without the possibility to interact or post responses. In this sense, they would also be similar to Telegram Channels.
The inclusion of newsletters is an interesting move that could be very successful if implemented properly. Newsletters remain a very popular form of communication, especially among companies and bloggers.
