Social Media: Is Facebook a Final Destination or Just Another Social Fling?
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Written By Noah Mallin | August 25, 2009 | Share This
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Recently, a client asked me why they should put time and resources into their Facebook fan page when users are only going to migrate to the next platform eventually. The question felt very last year but I had to really stop and examine why that is – what is to stop fickle users from fleeing Facebook? After all Friendster and to a lesser extent MySpace were once the networking sites du jour but each found users siphoned off by the next big thing. Why shouldn’t Facebook be a victim of user burnout too? Or does it even matter?
After all, you go where the people are today. It’s unlikely that users discovering a new social media destination will stampede in such numbers that your fan page will be rendered useless in a matter of months. Also, although they have been eclipsed by Facebook, both Friendster and especially MySpace serve particular subsets of users very well. In the case of MySpace teens and music fans find the eye-wateringly be-spangled site to be more relevant to them in many cases than Facebook.
Interestingly Facebook started from a relatively narrow base centered on students – non-student adults were in fact considered creepy and therefore not welcome. As student users entered the real world (if not MTV’s mostly fake The Real World) they continued to use the site and invite others to do so and a legend was born.
In fact, I would argue that Facebook’s original choice to evolve and open up to non-students set the community template for why they might be number one for quite some time.
Facebook has since committed themselves to constantly evolving to meet the needs of its users, whether they be corporate with their enhanced fan page functionality or personal, with real time updates and better search features.
Facebook’s acquisitions and enhancements of late also show a strategy based on cementing their status as the default social media platform for the widest possible audience. This is the common thread between their rapidly growing Facebook Connect product, which allows folks to use their Facebook login to access other web properties and their recent swallowing up of FriendFeed (which sadly didn’t get renamed FaceFeed), which allows users to aggregate their various updates from other social media. To top it off, this week they announced new fan page functionality which allows for simultaneous posting of Facebook updates on Twitter.
In a way, this mirrors the rise of Google, a company that was relatively late to the search game but which innovated its way past Lycos and Alta Vista and eventually Ask and Yahoo. Now no-one would question the importance of being present in a Google search, though ten years ago the necessity was far from evident.
That being said, Facebook could learn from Google’s simplicity. In the quest to be everything to everyone, they have cluttered up the user experience a bit – something they should keep an eye on as they position themselves for future growth.
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Topics: Facebook, Google, MySpace, Social Media, Twitter, Yahoo! |
I guess one of the major factor that Facebook was the last successful one before the economy went down the drain. Now no new “me too” SNS has no way to get financing, so they can ENJOY the slow time and establish their foothold. That happened to Amazon at the last bubble blast.
I think the others got out performed because they just didn’t evolve as much as they should have. Facebook continues to evolve and morph into what people want. Each updated makes things quicker, smoother and more user friendly.
Social media sites are very helpful in providing communication, advertisement and promotion of sites.
well written,fb is getting annoying to me as most of the times people keep on asking to play with them and i have to block those annoying gaming notifications,once i think that all the games have been blocked,couple of new ones pop up.M not against gaming but then everything has its time.thnx love this post