Since its launch in February 2004, Facebook has become ubiquitous. With 1.7 billion active users each month, there is no escaping it. What began as a way to connect with friends has become a marketing tool as companies focus on monetising all their relationships.
My consumer-facing company launched in the days when Facebook was called The Facebook and was accessible only on university campuses. A few months after our launch, we were approached by a passionate customer who wanted to start a Yahoo User Group (remember those?). The customer offered to moderate it and we were very happy to accept that offer. Soon thereafter, 6,000 customers were exchanging around 5,000 messages each month. It was quite remarkable as it all evolved unexpectedly.
The dialogue was rich and a real community was created. Some members became volunteers for our company, assisting at consumer shows and blogging, among other activities.
As Facebook grew from a university-based to a global focus, we transitioned our community of Yahoo User Group members to Facebook.
Facebook’s invitation was to “build your communities here and interact with them”. And we did. And it was great. And then as Facebook’s model shifted we began to see that what was once a lively interactive community morphed into a large group – 180,000 users today (the figure is probably overstated) who we could barely reach through a simple post. To reach more than 5,000 of our community, we needed to pay (“boost”) our posts. So “build your communities here and interact with them” has become “build your communities here and pay us to interact with them”. That hasn’t felt so good.
Undermining the business rationale for using the platform is the phenomenon of Facebook fatigue, a condition more and more friends and colleagues appear to be suffering of late. New York magazine had a telling piece last month about one man’s quest to unplug.
Stories such as these are the canaries in the coal mine, early warnings of the dangers of constantly being tethered to Facebook and the like. As our customers use Facebook primarily to connect with their friends, problems arise if there is a movement away from virtual connections back to real-world interactions for companies. The data doesn’t support that broad trend yet, but there may be an opportunity to lead as a company by moving in a different direction and appealing to customers in a new, real-world way.
We have wrestled with moving to another platform but there truly isn’t one. We see Instagram (owned by Facebook) going the same way, for example.
So, what to do?
One bright light is Facebook Live, its live video-streaming offering. It is free for now and appears to be able to reach four times the number of viewers as a regular post. The video medium is being prioritised by Facebook and Google, and Instagram’s recently launched Stories is a good example of that. Can video reimagine Facebook as a place to build true community? We shall see.
