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From Candy Crush requests to Marketplace invites, Facebook is unrecognisable from the site that forced our attention away from MySpace and Bebo back in 2004. With 42m pages and 10m apps, it appears to be heading in a new direction; one that sees its main role as host to a variety of apps and less like a social network in its own right. So what does this signal for the future of Mark Zuckerberg’s creation?
An identity crisis is a worrying, but very real, prospect in the not so distant future. Matt Owen from digital marketing community, Econsultancy, sums up the situation well by observing that Facebook appears to struggle with a need to be all things to all people. This is an interesting concept; with so many different features, many of the core elements that Facebook started out with are getting buried, under what is essentially clutter. Twitter by comparison seems to have carved its reputation around its niche micro-content sharing service, focusing primarily on what it does best.
Perhaps then it is this simplicity that has seen Twitter overtake Facebook when it comes to the interest of the younger generation. Investment bank and asset management firm, Piper Jaffray’s semi-annual teen market research report revealed that only 23% of teens claim Facebook to be the most important social network to them, compared to 26% for Twitter. This comes despite Facebook’s acquisition of high-profile apps, Instagram and WhatsApp, that many believed were an attempt to win back the waning affections of its younger audience.
Collecting apps at a rate of knots however has further implications than simply those on Facebook’s reputation. While the right acquisition can be a turning point in the success of a social network, too many apps affect usability for its mobile audience, of which there are now an estimated 1.07bn active users. Cluttering up users’ home screens and draining their batteries at best, harbouring privacy and security issues at worst, these apps are under more scrutiny than ever. Whatsapp is just one example of an app that faced intense inspection earlier in the year when it was revealed that rogue app developers could potentially steal a person’s entire Whatsapp history. It makes sense that if users fear their data is being shared without permission they’ll look to more trustworthy alternatives.
The GlobalWebIndex Social Q2 2014 Study showed that whilst 82% of internet users now have a Facebook account, there has been a 6% decrease in active usage, hardly music to the ears of Facebook marketers. Any social media professional will be keen to take advantage of the growing numbers of mobile users, and the privacy and security complications that come with Facebook apps could be enough to drive them away from the platform.
However, it is through this very group of people that Facebook generates much of its revenue, and it’s therefore likely it won’t want to alienate them further. It perhaps comes as no surprise then that Facebook is planning a project to make mobile apps much easier to use, linking them together seamlessly to mimic web pages within a browser, making the experience more like a general web search. The happy coincidence to this of course being that if it becomes easier for apps to link together, then it should be easier for ads to send users from app to app.
This project could go some way to improving usability in the short term, but looking at the wider picture, Facebook could benefit from taking a step back to concentrate on its core functions. One could be forgiven for believing that the site is already becoming less a place to interact with friends, and more a hub from which people can access their newsfeeds and view content from their peers.
Ben Austin is the CEO of Absolute Digital Media
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• How will Facebook keep marketers happy in its teenage years?
• Facebook buys WhatsApp: time to reconsider the ‘we don’t sell ads’ mantra
• Facebook too big to fail? Three warnings from Myspace
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