Twilio WhatsApp API: A great tool to reach new businesses

The trend in the last few years have indicated that businesses want to talk to their customers in the same way they communicate with their friends and family. This enables them to cater to their specific need and to create customer centric  products. Twilio, a cloud and communication based platform has been at the forefront of creating messaging solutions for businesses. Recently, Twilio has enabled developers to integrate SMSing and calling facilities into their applications using the Twilio Web Services API.

Over the last decade, Twilio customers have used Programmable SMS to build innovative messaging experiences for their users, whether it is sending instant transaction notifications for money transfers, food delivery alerts, or helping millions of people with the parking tickets. This latest feature added to the Twilio API integrates WhatsApp messaging into the application and manages messages and WhatsApp contacts with a business account.

Why is the Twilio Whatsapp integration so significant?

WhatsApp is one of the most popular instant messaging apps in the world presently. Everyday, 30 million messages are exchanged using WhatsApp. The visualization below shows the popularity of WhatsApp across different countries.

Source: Twilio

Integrating WhatsApp communications in the business applications would mean greater flexibility and ability to reach to a larger segment of audience.

How is it done

The operational overhead of integrating directly with the WhatsApp messaging network requires hosting, managing, and scaling containers in your own cloud infrastructure. This can be a tough task for any developer or business with a different end-objective and limited budget. The Twilio API makes it easier for you. WhatsApp delivers end-to-end message encryption through containers. These containers manage encryption keys and messages between the business and users. The containers need to be hosted in multiple regions for high availability and to scale efficiently, as messaging volume grows. Twilio solves this problem for you with a simple and reliable REST API.

Other failsafe messaging features like:

• User opt-out options from WhatsApp messages
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• Automatic switching to sms messaging in the absence of data network
• Shift to another messaging service in regions where WhatsApp is absent etc;

can be implemented easily using the Twilio API. Also, you do not have to use separate APIs to get connected with different messaging services like Facebook messenger, MMS, RCS, LINE etc as all of them are possible within this API.

WhatsApp is taking things at a slower pace currently. It initially allows you to develop a test application using the Twilio Sandbox for WhatsApp. This lets you to test your application first, and send messages to a limited number of users only. After your app gets production ready, you can create a WhatsApp business profile and get a dedicated Twilio number to work with WhatsApp.

Source: Twilio

With the added feature, Twilio enables you to leave aside the maintenance aspect of creating a separate WhatsApp integration service. Twilio takes care of the cloud containers and the security aspect of the application. It gives developers an opportunity to focus on creating customer centric products to communicate with them easily and efficiently.

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