YouTube Brings In-App Messaging, Sharing Feature to its App

YouTube has announced the global launch of its new feature for in-app messaging service on Android and iOS which has been under the testing phase since May, last year.

The in-app messaging has been built on the platform of YouTube which makes it simpler for users to share and chat using videos. This is not the only time where Google has tried to experiment with messaging on its various platforms. Last year, in September, a beta test was run by YouTube for its Community feature. It allowed creators of videos to engage better with their viewers using GIFs, text, and images.

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Benoît de Boursetty, Product Manager, YouTube, wrote in an official blog post, “Starting today, you can share videos with your friends and family directly on YouTube. Not only can you share and receive videos in the app, you can also chat about them right on YouTube, reply with another video, invite others to the conversation, and more. We think it’ll make sharing easier, faster and more fun on your phone. And if you want to continue sharing videos through other apps, you can still do that too.”

Google has rolled out this feature globally to serve its goal of developing a social-friendly platform which ultimately, would help YouTube. Firstly, it encourages increased engagement as users do not have to shift to Twitter or Facebook to share commentary or videos. This would allow YouTube to retain its audience, especially the heavy users. Heavy social users are those who spend three hours or more every day on social networks. Secondly, through in-app messaging, the number of views for videos is also likely to go up because the number of shares would increase. This could be a path-breaking result for YouTube as platforms such as Snapchat and Facebook have seen growth in triple digits for the number of daily views of videos. Lastly, this would help YouTube in capitalizing on the Social App and Messaging category which has been very successful. Through in-app messaging, YouTube can now position itself as a truly social app.

Eloise Bune, CEO of ScribbleChat, speaking about what this move means for YouTube, says,

YouTube launching a new sharing feature in its mobile app this week is a very interesting direction for them to take – can we now consider YouTube a messaging app just like WhatsApp, Kik, Viber or WeChat? It’s a bold move for YouTube to transition social activity that takes place around videos— including the sharing of links and chats about the video themselves— back into YouTube instead of other messaging apps. Allowing users to share messages and videos on one platform is key for user engagement and to keep users on the platform for a longer period of time. YouTube may face some challenges as they look to build their social network “from scratch”— but they are absolutely headed in the right direction in order to keep up and compete with some of the larger social media giants in their category.

Currently, the four most popular messaging apps are Viber, WeChat, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger which together have almost 3 billion users active monthly. It outnumbers the total number of active users on popular social networks which include Facebook. These growing numbers have been eyed by many businesses and publishers. Prominent names from the news industry are making their presence felt in the chat apps to make the most of them in terms of building an audience in spaces where content is getting consumed the most. They have been trying to identify the chat apps that work the most for their audiences so that they can be leveraged for distributing digital content in the form of video, surveys, images, and articles.

The global roll out of in-app messaging by YouTube is a step that clearly indicates the company’s aim of making conversations with video content take place exclusively on its video platform.