Viber is a popular calling and messaging app used to connect millions of people in over 190 countries. It offers an impressive suite of business tools enabling you to drive engagement and provide a great customer experience.
Features include instant messaging, Viber chatbots, group chats, and advertising solutions like sticker packs, display ads and promotional messages. Customer conversations can easily be managed via a dedicated business messaging inbox.
Learn about Viber Business Messages below, and discover 'Viber Communities' in detail – a stand-out feature that allows you to reach huge audiences and maximise engagement while ensuring users' privacy and security are maintained.
Viber Business Messages: Enabling Deeper Customer Connections
Viber Business Messages is Viber's official business version of the app. It's specifically for commercial use, helping you create meaningful connections between your business and your customers. It's ideal for text message marketing, but you can also use Viber for transactional or conversational messaging too. The pricing varies depending on the types of messages you want to send.
With Viber for Business, you'll get a branded Viber account showcasing your logo, phone number and address. This helps make your brand more recognisable and appear more trustworthy to users. Here are some other advantages of adding Viber to your mobile marketing strategy.
Over 1 billion people worldwide use Viber regularly.
Viber allows you to contact customers or prospects in real-time.
Texting is one of the most preferred communication channels for people of all ages (every second person prefers to text rather than call).
It's a direct, highly personal form of communication – your messages are delivered straight into your audience's hands.
Viber messages achieve a 97% delivery rate.
Viber business message content is flexible; conversation features allow for up to 1000 characters of text plus images, audio or video.
What are 'Viber Communities'?
Formerly known as Viber Public Chat, Viber Communities is the name of one of the channels on Viber that you can use to broadcast messages to a vast audience. It's similar to mass texting.
Viber users can choose to join communities based on shared interests. Communities can have a virtually unlimited number of members – the FC Barcelona Viber community, for example, has over 1.8 million members.
What is the difference between a Viber group and community?
Viber offers group chats for up to a maximum of 250 people. Each group member has writing permissions and can see each other's phone numbers (and can also call them). So this channel is best for private group conversations where members already know each other. On the other hand, a Viber Community can have a huge number of members and offers more protection and anonymity for individual users.
Why Viber Communities are better than groups
Take a look at the following reasons why it makes sense to set up a Viber Community rather than a group for reaching a wide target audience.
1. Enhanced privacy
As mentioned above, a Viber Community is more private than a group. Phone numbers of individual members are hidden from other community members. Even if two members want to have a private chat, they can do so without revealing their phone numbers to each other. (Members can access a list of other member names in the same community.)
2. Boosts customer engagement
New members joining a Viber Community can access the chat history (unlike with groups). Therefore, they can seamlessly enter into the conversation provided the community admins have allowed everyone to have writing permissions.
Community members can react or reply to specific messages and tag others in discussions. Admins can pin important messages to the top of the feed, conduct polls and quizzes and have two-way conversations with customers – crucial for deeper connections and brand awareness.
3. Administration and moderation
Viber Communities offers better admin and moderation controls compared to groups. There are different roles and permissions available as follows:
Superadmin – this is the creator of the community who has full access and control. Superadmins can add, remove or ban members or admins, edit the community description, image, name and icon, and delete messages.
Admins – these are people added by the Superadmin after creating the community. Admins can add members or remove them if they violate community (or Viber) rules. They can also delete inappropriate content or spam messages.
4. Built to scale
A Viber community is a substantially scaled-up version of groups. It's so much larger – you can have up to 1 billion members, which is almost one-eighth of the world's population!
When you compare Viber's virtually unlimited community member limit to other platforms, the difference is eye-opening. You can have just 1024 members in WhatsApp group chats (a recent increase from 512 members), while Telegram allows up to 200,000 group members.
5. Helps business growth
Viber gives you access to comprehensive reporting and analytics tools to help you see how your business community is performing. You can monitor community insights like user behaviours, engagement and interactions. And by connecting a Viber chatbot to your community, you can automate and route answers to specific questions, which improves conversation management (and saves time).
It's easy to invite new members to join your community through a direct invite within Viber or by sharing the community link via other texting platforms such as SMS or WhatsApp. Both admins and members can share the community this way unless the admins disable link-sharing.
6. Improves visibility
Viber Communities provide excellent brand visibility. Members can see community conversations in the same 'Chats' tab that houses all other personal and group chats.
As long as you set up your community as public rather than private, it'll be searchable. So other Viber users can potentially find your community through the search bar. You can use advertising options within your community too, for example, with custom-branded sticker packs. These are easily downloadable and shareable – you can automatically invite anyone who downloads your sticker pack to join your community.
Finally, whenever a message is shared from inside your community, it contains a label with your community's name. This helps generate further publicity. The key is to create sharable content that piques the interest of other users and encourages them to join.
Start a Viber Community for business today
If you've got a Viber business account and want to expand your customer database, use Viber Communities. It's ideal for broadcasting promotional messages about your products or services – and for getting conversations going with people who are interested in your offering. The sky's the limit regarding how many people you can reach.
Not yet using Viber for mobile marketing? Messente is an approved Rakuten Viber partner – talk to us about getting set up with Viber Business Messages.
