​WhatsApp Channels just got Four New Features

Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, announced that WhatsApp Channels has added four exciting new features for Channels, like polls and sending voice messages, among others.

Highlight

• Voice notes and polls are being added to WhatsApp Channels. As a result, celebrities and companies will have more opportunities to engage with their audience.
• Channel owners can add multiple admins and subscribers can exchange posts via Status updates using the chat app.
• Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, told people about these new features in a WhatsApp blog post.

WhatsApp Channels were made available to the public in the second half of 2023 as a broadcasting tool for companies, celebrities, and public personalities. It delivers effectively with a clear, easy-to-understand user interface and various value-added features, like custom sticker maker tools, the ability to pin key messages, and more in recent months.

Although the idea isn’t new, millions of people could finally receive direct updates from their favorite individuals and organizations when Channels arrived on one of the most popular messaging applications globally. The WhatsApp development team has been hard at work behind the scenes enhancing Channels with new capabilities including voice messaging and vote-taking. The chat app is now giving these tools and more to a lot of people around the world.

Multiple new features are coming to WhatsApp Channels, according to a channel post by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg (via WABetaInfo). It all starts with audio notes or voice texts. Facebook Messenger is the most popular chat app on all major operating systems, with more than two billion active users every month.

Here are the new updates made to WhatsApp Channels

1. Voice Updates:

You can now listen to voice notes on channels. This is cool because every day 7 billion sound texts are sent on WhatsApp. Adding voice notes opens a new option for channel admins to communicate with audiences, even if they could always send pictures and text messages to their followers.

2. Polls:

Channels now have polls, and the admin of a channel can ask you to answer questions. You know how useful polls are if you’ve used them in WhatsApp groups. Admins can now ask followers what they think about a wide range of issues, such as ideas for new products or whatever content they like best.

3. Share to Status:

Anyone may add channel postings to their WhatsApp Status, allowing channel followers to share noteworthy updates from channels on their own WhatsApp Status. This means that these changes may be seen by more people, which helps the Channels get more viewers. Developers were giving Status updates derived from channel updates additional context in a beta version that was released in December, so we got a chance to examine this functionality in action.

4. Multiple Admins:

Channels can now have more than a single admin, which is another big change. This is very helpful for big brands or groups that need to keep their channel open and answer messages quickly. With as many as sixteen individuals overseeing a news station, it becomes much simpler to keep you informed of breaking stories.

Even though we don’t know when these features will be released, it’s obvious they’re out of beta. These changes might not be made to the stable version of WhatsApp for Android, iOS, WhatsApp Web, or PC apps for a few days or a few weeks. These changes mostly affect channel owners. The only one that affects subscribers is the ability to share channel posts through Status updates. The new features will greatly enhance the one-way broadcasting function on WhatsApp, which allows companies to easily connect with their customers.

Conclusion

Although no specific release date has been announced, it is now abundantly evident that these enhancements have exited the beta stage. The stable version of WhatsApp for Android, iOS, WhatsApp Web, and desktop apps may not have these capabilities for a few days or weeks. All but one of these upgrades pertain to channel owners; the option to share channel posts via Status updates is the only one that pertains to subscribers. These new features will, however, make it easier for brands and customers to interact with each other on WhatsApp’s one-way streaming tool.