To preserve your privacy and give yourself a more professional appearance, WhatsApp will allow you to create an alternative profile, with a photo and a name visible only to people who are not part of your contacts.
With its two billion active monthly users and tens of billions of messages exchanged every day, WhatsApp has become an all-purpose messaging service, used daily, whether to communicate with loved ones, organize with colleagues or carry out transactions with complete strangers. But we do not necessarily want our profile to be visible in the same way to our friends as to our professional colleagues, particularly with regard to our photo… Currently, WhatsApp allows, within the confidentiality settings, to display a photo visible only to our contacts – with the possibility of excluding some – or to everyone. If we choose the first option, anyone trying to contact us without being in our contacts will see a profile without any photos. A way to maintain a little confidentiality, but not very practical when you want to be identifiable by people outside your contact list – for professional needs for example. But it seems that WhatsApp has found the solution! As spotted by the specialized site WABeta Info, it will soon be possible to have a profile photo and a name that will only be visible to contacts who do not have access to the main profile information. People who are not in the contact list will see an alternative profile photo.
Alternative profile: towards more professional messaging
The “Alternative Profile” function should allow us to preserve our privacy a little more, while presenting us favorably to possible customers and other strangers who would like to contact us. Perfect for clearly separating private and professional communications. This new feature was discovered in the latest beta update of WhatsApp for Android 2.23.24.4. It is still in development and is therefore, for the moment, inaccessible to beta testers. So it shouldn’t arrive right away.
This function clearly marks WhatsApp’s desire to be more than a user-friendly instant messaging service. Even if it first arrived as a complement to traditional SMS in a private setting, the application is increasingly used in professional settings. There is also a version called WhatsApp Business designed to meet the needs of small business owners. The latest new features integrated into messaging go in this direction, as evidenced by the appearance of channels, which brings it a little closer to a social network (see our article) and Flows, an interface dedicated to purchases, allowing you to place orders directly from a conversation, payment included (see our article).