Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Facebook is launching a new app to let small business owners manage pages and profiles across Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram, COO Sheryl Sandberg announced in a blog post Thursday. The app, called Facebook Business Suite, will merge the back end infrastructure of the three apps so small business owners can receive messages from customers, alerts, and notifications in one unified inbox. It plans to add WhatsApp integration in the future, the company confirmed to The Verge.
The app will also let small businesses post to Facebook and Instagram at the same time and provide insights about how ad campaigns are performing on the platforms. Much of this cross-posting functionality already is available for admins of Instagram business…