facebook announces its latest 3 updates for its messenger platform

 Facebook has announced three new key features for the company's Messenger product, which Facebook says now has over 1 billion monthly active users. Last week, Facebook introduced Message Reactions and Mentions for Messenger. Message Reactions enables users to react to a message in Messenger with an emotion by pressing and holding any message and then selecting a reaction. Reactions include love, smile, wow, sad, angry, thumbs up, and thumbs down emojis. 

The feature notably takes cues from Apple's Tapback feature launched last year for iOS iMessage. Mentions for Messenger creates a way to directly alert someone in a group chat on Messenger when they've been mentioned in a message. Like on other social platforms, including the core Facebook app, users can do this by typing the "@" symbol before someone's name. 

 Facebook also announced a new way for users to quickly share their locations in Messenger. These new features for Facebook Messenger add to the social network's fast pace of innovation on the platform, and OOT messaging like Facebook messenger and whatsapp   continue to see increased adoption and it also  highlight how integral Facebook believes messaging is becoming. 

Other recent major updates for Facebook's messaging apps include Snapchat stories formats made specifically for both Messenger and WhatsApp, as well as group video chat for Messenger. It's not surprising that Facebook is betting as aggressively on messaging. 

Beyond Messenger and WhatsApp each boasting 1 billion and 1.2 billion monthly active users, respectively, Facebook's high levels of user engagement on its messaging apps is evident by a few other metrics. For instance, 400 million people now use voice and video chat on Messenger every month. Further, the volume of messages per day across WhatsApp and Messenger are essentially off the charts as global SMS messaging peaked at about 20 billion messages per day and WhatsApp and Messenger alone now boast 60 billion messages or more per day, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in the company's most recent earnings call.