I came across an article in the NY Times called, “Face-lift at Facebook, to Keep its Users Engaged.” This article examined the current status of facebook. Facebook has one billion users worldwide and is known as one of the most profitable enterprises to date. However, recently facebook suffered a drop in share value as well as unsettling news that 61% of users had “taken a sabbatical from the social newtwork, sometimes for months at a time,” due to boredom.
Facebook is always trying to reinvent itself by constantly trying to add new features. Most recently, Facebook is working to revamp the News Feed, to allow for “bigger photos, more videos and more engaging ads.” I believe this can work for a while, if Facebook is able to get relevant News Feed data available to its users. If they can’t then they can actually alienate some users with “finely targeted advertisements” that don’t reach them.
My question is , will Facebook be able to continue to remake and reinvent itself to keep users engaged? Can Facebook ever become irrevelant like Myspace or other social networks that we no longer use? Or is facebook simply so valuable to marketers that they will ensure its success and that it is here to stay?
I think that the value of Facebook to users is often undervalued. Yes, many users are switching to Instagram and Twitter but Facebook is still overwelmingly better at connecting people from all corners of the earth. I also believe that facebook has become a necessary tool for marketers and they don’t want to see it go anywhere. Society is also moving towards personalization and Facebook mirrors that.
What do you think?
I think that Facebook can be an on-going trend because it is used for so many different reasons. Along with linking individuals together, it also links corporations with their consumers, professors to their students, and long distant relatives to their loved ones. Although there are other sites such as Twitter and Instagram that are now up and coming, Facebook has already developed its vast customer base all over the world. My example of this would be with my Spanish class here at Baruch. We set up individual Facebook accounts that we use on a weekly basis to communicate in Spanish with one another. The fact that you get to change the settings such as language to fit your culture is widely recognized.
As it currently sits, Facebook is here to stay. It it too effective at connecting people with their friends and their interests. Facebook as a business has two huge competitive advantages. First, is it quantity of users. Facebook did a masterful job of turning software that was used by college students, into a network that is used by everyone. The fastest growing age demographic for Facebook is not in their 20’s, it’s people 30 and above. This huge user base will keep them going for the distant future. The other competitive advantage that Facebook has is the easy interface. MySpace didn’t die because it got old, it died because Facebook’s user interface makes everything else obsolete. You both mentioned how Facebook has competition from Twitter and Instagram, but their software can’t do half the things that Facebook does.
That being said, Facebook does have two risks to its future. The first is it becoming “MySpaced.” Just like Facebook made MySpace obsolete, any one of the number of new social networks that come out every year could be the one that does it to Facebook. The second risk for Facebook is not new. They are constantly struggling on how to turn their huge user base into revenue. The advertising is getting more personalized and invasive, so maybe there will be a tuning point where users become fed up and leave.
I think facebook will always remain the backbone of social networking sites. People will go with trend sites like instagram to look at pictures and twitter to read some one-liners or short sentences here and there. But on a lrger note, facebook has both of those things plus everything else people look for in a social media site. Facebook is for friends, family, far away friends, classmates, and has just about everyone you can ever meet and everyone you ever met on it. People will continue to come back to Facebook simply becuase no one else is going anywhere and everyone will just be a click away. Facebook is advancing wih more features to keep people from drifting to the new trends. However, people may make accounts with these other sites but somehow they always make sure to place a link to there Facebook pages on them!
I agree with Mike. Its hard to compete with a company that has the dominant share in the social media space. Furthermore, Facebook’s has become very significant in our everyday lives and on a global level, to the extent that it has been integrated in our culture and language. This is similar to how Google experienced its exponential growth over the past few years. Google became so important that the actual word “Google” became a verb.