Social networking plays an important role in our daily life.  Recently, Facebook, the largest social networking business, has bought WhatsApp (which is one of the largest mobile messaging apps). This action can impact people in different ways.

Here are some good influences: From Facebook’s perspective, this expansion helps Facebook to broaden its market and target customers. This may help Facebook to gain more competitive advantages, which leads to higher market share. As the market leader in social networking market, Facebook has made itself so competitive that its rivals can hardly compare with it. From WhatsApp’s perspective, this action can help promoting the business by using Facebook. Since there’re many competitors in mobile messaging market, this will definitely benefit WhatsApp. Moreover, Facebook is providing $19bn, this allows WhatsApp to make improvement on its app, and spend the money on more expansion plans. From consumers’ perspective, it can bring convenience. Since most people have Facebook nowadays, consumers may gain advantages due to their mergence. And for the social messaging market, this action may help it to increase awareness, which helps attract more consumers.

However, there are also negative impacts. From Facebook’s and WhatsApp’s rivals perspectives, more difficulties are made for them to compete with these two businesses, which also make this market very competitive, which may affect the suppliers and consumers since there’s less competitions. In addition, from the telecom companies’ perspective, they would get less attention from the consumers, which will affect their incomes and consumer numbers. As social networking market is growing rapidly, companies such as Facebook are becoming the strongest threat-substitutes for telecom companies.

Reference:

• Online business article, [URL: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-29477447] BBC news, Facebook given green light to buy WhatsApp, Last accessed: 2014-10-05