For Instagram, Meta Looks Beyond Content

Meta in India is channeling Instagram for advertising business, apart from content creation, country head Sandhya Devanathan said at a session on ‘Meta and Commerce in India’. 

Millions of small businesses who use Meta’s messaging service WhatsApp for Business are also promoting their brands on Instagram through which they complete their sales cycles, she said.

“We have enabled Click To WhatsApp Feature for Businesses promoting on Instagram so that the potential consumers directly reach out to these businesses through a single click and connect them on WhatsApp, thereby enabling completion of sales cycles for these businesses.”

The tech giant has put a daily limit to the messages which can be sent out to a particular consumer to avoid customers being spammed. “We can now say with confidence that Meta is aware of the purchasing behaviour of the GenZ and millennials on the basis of the content they consume on Instagram. We recently conducted a survey in which the respondents said that they are confident of buying from WhatsApp after seeing some form of promotional content or ad on Instagram,” she said.

Meta has partnered with brands like IndiGo and HDFC Bank to make customer care and various consumer-facing operations more efficient. “We have added nearly 200 features on WhatsApp for Business to ensure higher customer engagement which helps small businesses,” Devanathan said.

The interview was done at the Razorpay FTX event in Bengaluru last week.

India is a key market for Meta and its family of apps – Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads. For instance, Instagram had 362.9 Mn active users in India as of January 2025, making the South Asian nation its largest market globally.

Meta’s newer products such as its large language AI model, Llama, are also seeing strong adoption in the country. Over the last few years, India has emerged as a prime mover for Meta’s new products and features. 

For instance, Reels, which was initially unveiled in 2020 in India, is now a global success. The company also debuted the WhatsApp Business Payments feature in India.

Over the past few years, Instagram has introduced several add-on features for small and medium businesses to facilitate commerce in India, including Shop Now, Insta Stories, Shoppable Tags. Several users use the app for search-based shopping. 

While Instagram shopping has transformed small and medium businesses that exclusively operate on the app, new-age tech companies like Swiggy, Paytm, Meesho among others use ads in Instagram Stories to increase their customer base and drive app installs.