WhatsApp Multimedia for SMS, Text & WhatsApp in Salesforce
Your letting agent wants to send a buyer a floor plan, 6 photos and the brochure PDF, all at once, via WhatsApp, tied to the Salesforce Property record. Without multimedia, it’s three separate apps and a manual upload. With it, it’s one click from the Salesforce record.
Why multimedia matters where SMS can’t reach
Your SMS channel is limited to 160 characters of text, no images. Text messages vary but most can’t reliably carry attachments across carriers. WhatsApp accepts images, videos, PDFs, audio, and documents up to 100MB. For any business where the answer is visual, properties, products, designs, reports, WhatsApp multimedia is the only channel that works at scale.
Your AI SMS House handles multimedia on WhatsApp natively. Your SMS and text stay text-only (as the channels require). Your WhatsApp messages carry whatever the business moment needs. Your one app does correct behaviour per channel.
What you can attach
Your file types you can send via WhatsApp Business API:
- Images, JPG, PNG up to 5MB
- Documents, PDF, DOC, DOCX, XLSX up to 100MB
- Video, MP4, 3GPP up to 16MB
- Audio, AAC, M4A, AMRNB, MP3 up to 16MB
- Stickers, WebP up to 100KB
Your Salesforce admin can restrict attachment types per use case, e.g. block audio from support conversations, allow PDFs only for mortgage workflows. Restrictions live in admin setup and apply automatically.
Attachment storage and Salesforce Files
Your every WhatsApp attachment stores in Salesforce Files, linked to the record the message attached to. A property agent’s WhatsApp message with 6 photos creates one WhatsApp message record and 6 linked File records on the Salesforce Property. Your negotiator sees the photos on the record without leaving Salesforce.
Your incoming attachments work the same way. A borrower snaps a photo of their pay stub on WhatsApp, the image stores to the Salesforce Loan record as a File, and your processor reviews it alongside the conversation. No email chasing, no manual file naming.
Use cases that only work with multimedia
You’ll find a few of your workflows where multimedia is the difference between a complete conversation and a broken one:
- Real estate, floor plans, property photos, virtual tour links, brochures via WhatsApp
- Mortgage, borrower sends pay stub and bank statement photos, you send loan estimate PDFs
- Healthcare, patient sends wound photos for triage, clinic sends appointment confirmation PDF with map
- Retail, catalogue images, product photos, receipts, warranty PDFs
- Education, consent form PDFs, timetable images, campus map attachments
You’ll recognise every one of these used to require you to ask for email or an app download. WhatsApp multimedia handles them in the chat the customer is already in.
Compliance considerations for multimedia
Your attachments carry compliance weight SMS doesn’t. A photo of someone’s ID, bank statement, or medical condition is personal data under any privacy regime. Your Salesforce permission model controls who can view each attachment. Your retention policy applies to attachments the same as to messages.
Your messenger doesn’t force compliance on you, it respects the compliance you’ve already built into Salesforce. Attachment access, retention and audit all flow through standard Salesforce governance, not a second tool’s settings.