Popular messaging app Kik recently launched promoted chats to make some money from brands looking for a way to get in front of its sizable user base. Now, the app is making the offering better for these brands to make it more worth their money.
Kik announced Promoted Chats Keywords, which enable advertisers to prepare responses to questions about questions users are likely to ask when interacting with them. The company explains on its blog:
Keywords will let brands provide you with more personalized information. Some of our top brands using Promoted Chats have hundreds of thousands of people chatting with them, and manually replying to each message would be impossible. Our Keywords feature lets brands create responses even before a question is asked!
For example, if a popular band wanted to promote a concert, chatters might ask questions like, “How much do tickets cost?” “Can you get to the venue on public transit?” “What time is my favorite band playing?” With Keywords, the band can prepare responses to questions like these and connect each response with a keyword, like “tickets,” “cost” or “public transit,” in an easy-to-use dashboard. The result: You get an immediate response to your questions, with relevant information.
Here’s such a conversation in action:
According to Kik, over six and a half million users have opted in to chat with a brand partner, and over a hundred million messages have been exchanged between the brands and users.
Earlier this year, GlobalWebIndex released a report on global trends in social platform usage, finding that Kik was the second fastest growing social app behind Snapchat. It was ahead of apps like WhatsApp, Vine, and Instagram.
Image via Kik