In September of last year, Facebook introduced a cross-platform messaging experience for Messenger and Instagram, allowing you to communicate with other Facebook users who didn't have Instagram accounts without having to switch apps. That Instagram messaging experience also included support for audio and video calls, although it was still in beta testing at that time with hundreds of participants including 30 developers and 700 different brands.
Today, Facebook announced that the Messenger API for Instagram exited beta. The tool is now available to all developers worldwide and businesses can now keep in touch with customers through Instagram using the Messenger experience.
The API gives brands and businesses access to Instagram's messaging tools and lets them incorporate them into their own services and apps. Through this integration, business employees can manage a large volume of Instagram chats from customers. Prior to this integration, businesses that wanted to reach out to customers on Instagram had to interact with them directly through that platform or through Facebook's unified messaging service for businesses, with some limitations.
As part of today's announcement, Facebook also noted some takeaways from the beta testing: companies seek better ways to manage communications from a single location and businesses want to invest more in workflows, tools, and people to improve how they manage their communications. The latest move highlights the social networking site's growing effort to bring all of its chat apps under one umbrella.
