How to create a WhatsApp Business account

While you’ve probably already included platforms like Twitter and Facebook in your social media strategy, WhatsApp could be equally as important to your brand.

That’s right: WhatsApp isn’t just for texting your coworkers or video chatting with your family in a different city. It can be used for business, too.

WhatsApp Business was created specifically with small business owners in mind. It can help you connect with your customers and support them with immediate, personalized customer service.

If you’ve never considered adding a WhatsApp Business account into your brand’s social strategy, we’ll show you how and its uses.

1. Download the WhatsApp Business app for Android or iPhone

Find the app on the App Store or Google Play, or download it via WhatsApp’s site.

2. Agree to the terms and conditions

3. Enter your business’s phone number

4. Fill in your details

After you enter your phone number, you will automatically be directed to this page. Fill in the essential details like your business name, add a profile picture and select a category that best describes your business.

Bonus: Download our free WhatsApp for Customer Care guide to get more pointers on how to use WhatsApp Business to get higher conversion rates, better customer experience, lower costs, and higher customer satisfaction.

5. Learn more about the WhatsApp business tools

In the next step, you can learn about setting up a product catalog for your ecommerce or automated messaging.

You can also skip the tutorial and go straight to settings.

Before you move on to advanced features like automated messaging, make sure to add more information about your business. You can manage addresses, hours and websites in the Business Profile category in settings.

6. Now, start connecting with your customers

That’s it! Now that you know how to create a WhatsApp account for your business, you can start using the messenger app to communicate with customers.

4 great uses of WhatsApp for business

So, why should you use WhatsApp as a business owner? Here are 4 things the app might help you with.

Elevate your customer service

With a WhatsApp Business account, you can make your social media customer service more efficient and personal.

On top of serving as a channel for direct messaging, WhatsApp Business has several tools that you can use to elevate communication with customers:

• Quick Replies. Save answers to commonly asked questions as templates and set up shortcuts. This will give you back the time you would spend typing out the answers to repeating questions. And, your customers will get their questions answered faster.

• Labels. Use labels to organize and categorize users and messages. This will help you sort messages by urgency and recognize returning customers. You can use pre-programmed labels or create new ones that make sense for your business.

• Away Messages and Greeting Messages. Set up these automated messages so your customer gets a response immediately, even if you’re unable to respond. This is a great way to set expectations for response times if a customer reaches out outside of your business hours.

On top of all this, it’s simply easy and affordable to communicate with international customers via WhatsApp Business.

Showcase your products in a catalog

You can think of WhatsApp Business’s catalog tool as a mobile storefront. It lets your customers browse your products without leaving the app.

This tool is useful for highlighting new products, seasonal collections or bestsellers.

Here are a few key facts about the catalog:

• You can upload a maximum of 500 products or services.
• Each product or service can include a title, price, description, product code and link to the product on your website.
• Each product has an image.
• You can share links from the catalog in WhatsApp conversations.

Communicate with colleagues or employees

WhatsApp Business isn’t just for communicating with customers. It’s also a useful way to stay in touch with employees. In fact, messenger apps like WhatsApp are used by 79% of professionals for communication at work.

The group chat feature lets you message with up to 256 people at one time. It’s possible to send PDFs and other documents over WhatsApp business. Files can be up to 100MB.

Network with other professionals

Finally, you use WhatsApp to communicate with others in your industry. The app’s video call tool can be used in a professional networking capacity, just like Zoom or Skype.

You can even sync WhatsApp Business with your desktop, so those professional networking calls can be done from your office computer rather than your phone.