Messenger Adds New ‘Shortcuts’ to Streamline Messaging Communication

This could make your Messenger communications a whole lot easier.

Today, Messenger has announced new Messenger Shortcuts, which are simple, universal commands you can use within your chats to more easily share announcements, make payments, activate app functionalities and more.

As per Messenger:

“We’re excited today to introduce shortcuts on Messenger, a new command system to help supercharge your messaging efficiency and add a little extra fun to your experience. Whether you want to notify everyone in a chat of an important announcement, pay a friend back for lunch, Messenger’s new shortcuts will get you there in the shortest number of keystrokes.”

As you can see in the above example, Messenger shortcuts currently come in two forms. The first, in this example, uses @commands, like @everyone to broadcast a message to all users in the chat.

“When you start a message with @everyone, all participants in the chat will be notified. @everyone is perfect for group reminders, impromptu get-togethers or when you need to gather the braintrust to crowdsource an answer to a time-sensitive question. This way, your message gets maximum exposure, and nobody misses out.”

So while any message that you post to a group chat will be viewable by all participants, @everyone adds a more pointed notification, which could be good for prompting response from all members, and emphasizing key announcements.

In addition to this, users can also now type in:

• /silent – Members of your chat will not receive a notification of your message, to limit distractions (also available on Instagram as “@silent”)

While coming soon, Messenger is also adding:

• /gif – Typing in /gif and your chosen topic will provide a range of GIF options to help emphasize your message
• /Pay – An easier way to request money from group chats. “Simply type /pay to send or request money securely, without fees – perfect for quickly paying a friend for dinner or getting paid back for a ride.”

• /shrug & /tableflip – Auto adds the ‘shrug’ and ‘tableflip’ emoticons, saving you from having to type them in manually (or find a copy online to copy and paste)

Messenger says that it will be looking to add even more shortcuts soon, providing more ways to quickly and easily connect within your Messenger chats.

It’s a handy addition, which will no doubt prove popular, and will quickly become a habitual element. That will then see it inevitably copied by every other messaging app – though it is also worth noting that you can already add in your own personal text replacements on your device. That’s not exactly the same, as most of Messenger’s new options facilitate expanded functionality, but similar tools do currently exist, and have been around for quite a bit.

Given this, it’s not a revolution or any major shift. But as we’ve noted before, simplification is sometimes just as good as innovation in the social media space, and these new features will certainly simplify and streamline the messaging process.

The first two shortcuts are available in Messenger now, with the others coming soon.