Special Whatsapp Tips You Need To Know

Whatsapp is an instant messaging app for smartphones founded in 2009 by Brian Acton and Jan Koum both former employees of yahoo Whatsapp was acquired by Facebook in april 2014 for a whopping sum of US$19 million. Whatsapp currently has a total of over 800 million active users, which makes it the biggest instant messaging app in the world. If you are one of the 800 million active users that use whatsapp, there are probably a few features that you either don't understand or simply find annoying!

Useful WhatsApp Tips and Tricks

How To Know If Your Message Has Been Read

At times, You send you send a message to a friend and when he doesn't reply after a long time, you start to wonder if he got your message, if he didn't or if he just chose not to reply? To know if your friend received your message, simply check under the message you sent, you would see an icon. If its just one tick, that means the message was sent but not delivered. If its two ticks, it means your message was sent, delivered but not read. And if its two blue ticks, then your message has been sent, delivered and read.

How To Get Back Deleted Messages

Imagine you accidentally delete an important message...That would be painful right? What if I told you there is a way you can get back that lost message....pretty cool, huh? One of the best improvements the new versions of the whatsapp messenger app have is the ability to backup and restore messages. Every morning at 4am your whatsapp messages are automatically backed up, so if you wish to restore your deleted message you need to do it before then, or else your message history would backed up and your messages gone forever.

The easiest way to restore your lost message is by UN-installing your whatsapp messenger app and re-installing it. While you are installing the app it will ask if you want to restore messages from saved back up, select yes and your message history for the last seven days would be restored along with the deleted message(s). If you want to restore messages older than seven days on android, use ES FILE EXPLORER or any other similar file manager app. Go to SD Card - Whatsapp - Databases to view your backups locate the back up you want to restore and rename it to msgstore.db.crypt then Go to Settings - Apps - Whatsapp click on clear data.

Run the whatsapp messenger app and restore when prompted and your messages would be restored!

Note: This works only on android devices.

How To Send Multiple Messages At Once

So, you have this important class assignment you wish to share with all your classmates and you do not have the time to send all the messages individually. Do you know that you can send the message to all your classmates at the same time? Whatsapp's broadcast feature allows you to send the same message to different people all at once. The beauty of this feature is that, whatever message you broadcast would appear as a private message to all the recipients and no one will know the message was broadcasted.

For android, press menu and select "New Broadcast" then select all the contacts you want to receive the message then press Done at the top-right corner of your phone, now press Create also at the top-right corner.  With that your broadcast list been created now you just enter the message you want to broadcast and send it just like regular chatting and also the members of the broadcast list would receive the message.

When they reply the message, it will go to just you and not the full list.

How To Retain Your Chat History When You Switch Phones

So, you are planning to switch your Smartphone for that cool new one you saw at the store but are worried about losing all your chat history. What if I told you that you can actually move your chat history from your old device to the cool new smartphone? The backup and restore feature is coming into play again.

To move your chat history from the old to the new device all you have to do is;

If you use an SD card, go to Menu - Settings - Chat Settings - Back up. Back up your conversations.

If your back up is saved on your internal memory(phone memory) you just manually move it to your SD card.

Remove your SD card, insert it in your new phone.

Run WhatsApp messenger on your new phone and select restore when prompted.

And the chat history backed up on your SD card would be loaded unto your new phone.

How To Use WhatsApp Messenger on PC

 If you have Google Chrome installed on your pc, go to whatsapp.com and follow the instructions there for your phone. Make sure your phone is connected to the internet, I recommend you use WiFi because whatsapp web synchronizes with your phone. Select whatsapp web from menu in your phone's whatsapp messenger and scan the QR code in the browser. you can now receive timely notifications and chats on your computer.

Time Saving Tip

This is just something I remembered towards the end of the post the end of the post, thought I'll add it. If you have a friend that you chat with all the time you can easily add a short-cut to the chat on your home screen so instead of having to go through all the trouble of launching your whatsapp, blah, blah, blah, all you need to do is just click on the icon on the home screen and it will lead you directly to chat. That saves a lot of time. To do this, open your whatsapp messenger on your phone go to chats, long press the contact you want to your home screen then select "add short-cut to chat" .

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