What is a WhatsApp broadcast list, and how do you create one?
PingPlug · Updated
A broadcast list is a saved set of contacts inside the WhatsApp or WhatsApp Business app that you can message together, with each person receiving a separate private chat rather than a shared thread. It holds up to 256 contacts, lives on the device that created it, and delivers only to recipients who have your number in their address book.
How to create one
In the WhatsApp or WhatsApp Business app, open the Chats tab, take the overflow menu, and choose New broadcast. Pick the recipients, confirm, and the list is saved.
It then behaves like a chat thread: it sits in your chats, and opening it and taking list info is where recipients are added or removed later.
Two things are worth knowing before you build one. The recipients must already be in your phone contacts to be selectable at all, and the finished list belongs to that handset — there is no account it syncs to.
Where the list actually lives
On the phone that made it. A broadcast list is not an account-level object, so it does not follow you to another device, and a colleague cannot use one you built.
For a business this is the first thing that breaks. The audience you assembled is stranded on one handset, and if that handset is replaced the list goes with it.
Why it is not the same as a group
Members of a broadcast list never learn of each other. There is no shared thread and no visible membership, and a reply is seen only by you.
That is the correct arrangement for customers, who have no reason to be introduced to one another and every reason not to have their numbers exposed.
What it cannot tell you
Whether it worked. There is no per-recipient report, so a message that silently reached a third of the list looks identical to one that reached all of it.
Who left. Nobody unsubscribes from a broadcast list; they block you, which harms the quality rating governing how much you can send in future.
What businesses move to instead
A contact list held by the business rather than by a device, segmented by what is known about each person, and sent through the WhatsApp Business Platform where the saved-contact condition does not apply.
The trade is real rather than free: the Platform requires an approved template to begin a conversation, and Meta charges for business-initiated messaging.
In PingPlug the audience is a segment of the contacts database, not a list on a handset, so it survives a change of phone and is available to everyone on the team. Each send records per-recipient delivery, which is the reporting a device-side broadcast list cannot produce.