RadiumOne Adds WhatsApp To Its Po.st Social Share Button Options

This might be the start of a trend.

RadiumOne this week announced that it has added share-to-WhatsApp button to its Po.st suite of social media share button options.

RadiumOne said it was the first; it won’t be the last.

WhatsApp, in the process of being acquired by Facebook for $19 billion, has too big a target audience, with more than 500 million users who send as many as 64 billion messages a day.

And there is some evidence that some of those peer-to-peer or group messages are people sharing publishers’ content.

BuzzFeed and USA Today’s viral sports blog have both seen encouraging results after testing share-to-WhatsApp buttons to their mobile sites. Digiday reported last month that the USA Today blog’s WhatsApp button was being used more than the Twitter button after only a week on the site.

That’s got to be an eye-opening result, especially for a media industry struggling to reach and monetize as many eyeballs as possible. But publishers’ experimentation with WhatsApp has been limited because the service doesn’t easily integrate with third-party apps or even Android browsers.

RadiumOne’s version of the button — click here for more information about how the integration looks — will only appear to those who visit a site using an iOS device.