5 Facebook Messenger tricks that you may not have heard of

Facebook Messenger has evolved into its very own entity. A force that while being associated with Facebook for obvious reasons, is also a very strong, versatile communication app for all to use. The best thing about Facebook Messenger isn’t even the fact that you can send and receive messages, photos and media (because let’s face it, a lot of apps let you do that these days).

The real fun to be had with Messenger is all of the quirky features and hidden tricks that you probably haven’t heard of. While there are loads of fun stuff to explore with the app, we’re going to focus on just five of them. So read on below and expand your social world with some cool tricks for Messenger.

1) Go Large or Go Home

To start things off we’ll go with the wonderful feature of supersizing your emoji icons. We all know that feeling of sending a funny emoji to our friends and feel all smug for a moment with how perfectly timed it was. Well Messenger lets you take this to the next level. When you’re using the app and chatting to a friend, in the bottom-right hand corner there will be an icon, usually a thumbs up unless you change it. Simply hold down on this icon and it will grow and grow until it finally deflates back down. Release your finger at the required size and you’ll send a much larger version of the emoji.

2) Instant Games at Your Fingertips

There was once a time you could send a particular emoji (like a basketball for example) and it would initiate some kind of fun game to play. Well that feature might not exist any more but that’s because it’s been replaced by instant games. To access them, open up your Facebook Messenger app and make sure you’re on the main screen, the one which lists all of your chats. At the bottom of the screen you’ll see an icon of a game controller. Tap it and you’ll be given a list of loads of games, all of which you can just start playing instantly.

3) Keeping Things on the Down Low – Secret Conversations

More and more messenger apps are incorporating end-to-end encryption for your conversations. This basically means that your data is secure from one end to the other. Facebook saw this and thought ‘Let’s make it even better and make it a feature’. And that’s exactly what they did. If you want to have a conversation that is practically locked inside a vault in an underground layer surrounded by soldiers then you’ll want “Secret Conversations”. To do this, open the Messenger app and in the top-right hand corner you’ll see an icon of your profile pic. Tap this and navigate down to “Secret Conversations” and enable it.

Then simply start a new chat and tap the “Secret” option in the corner. This will securely make your chat safe and sound. It does restrict some features, such as being able to navigate through your chat history or send animated GIF’s but for the most part your chat will be normal as always.

4) Customize Your Conversation

One cool feature you can implement into your chat is the option to customize your conversations. It’s really simple to do as well. Open a chat with someone and in the top-right corner you’ll see an (i) icon. Tap on this and you’ll be greeted with a list. From there you can change the color theme of your chat, change the emoji (the one that you can supersize), add nicknames for people – which can be very funny in a group chat – along with other options like starting a secret conversation.

5) Personalize Your Emoji – Because Why Not?

Lastly we have a cool emoji related feature. If you’re chatting to someone and want to be a little bit more expressive with your emoji responses, then there’s an easy solution. When scrolling through your list of emoji, find one you want and providing it is suitable (like a hand, thumbs up etc) you can hold down on it to bring up an array of different color schemes. You can also hold down on any emoji which can’t be altered and it’ll send and start to grow bigger the longer you hold it down.

And there we have it. Five really cool features that are integrated into the Messenger app that you might not have known about. You can dig around and explore a little deeper too to discover all sorts of other features (like location sharing). Messenger has evolved into something that is so much more than just a way of exchanging messages and we’re sure it’s only going to get better and better.