For me it’s actually quite hard to remember a time when Facebook wasn’t part of my life. I probably check my phone a good half dozen times throughout the day and evening to see what is going on in the world, in business – especially the competition and of course among my friends and family.
That said, recent studies say Facebook’s days are numbered! Apparently teenagers find it boring and many are being put off by the increasing amount of advertising filling up their news feeds. I disagree…
Lets face it they must be doing something right because in 2013 they made an impressive 1.5 billion profit! And their users stats continue to grow.
One of their greatest strengths is that they regularly add new features and functionality to the site. Always improving user experience. They know that a good thing won’t last forever and are constantly developing and improving the site to offer more features and benefits to their now 1.23 billion users worldwide.
My only concern would be that teenagers might swap to a more private service like Whatsapp or Snapchat in a bid to be away from parental eyes on Facebook. Parents can leave embarrassing comments and many teenagers opt for other options to escape this problem.
However, in terms of ad revenues for Facebook it is the older users who have spending power and so this may be a positive shift for Facebook if they can maintain engagement of the masses.
Facebook continue to develop their ad algorithm so that users only see highly relevant ads. So rather than showing hair loss cream to someone who has a full thick head of hair it shows lustrous shampoo that leaves your hair silky smooth! This will only improve user experience and should reduce users’ inclination to move away from Facebook.
Facebook’s communications manager said:
“Today people have shared the birth of their first child, wedding, hooked up, broke up, mourned, outed themselves, said something dumb, said something profound, confessed that life’s got too hard for them, been brought back from the brink by a friend, or a stranger, found a job, posted something that lost them their job, learned a fact that will save their life one day, found their new favourite song, and hit ‘like’ on a cat picture – all on Facebook.”
The fact is that humans like to share, communicate, feel someone is listening and above all we are curious. That is why I believe Facebook is here to stay. It fulfils our basic instincts in such an easily accessible way.
Chief executive Mr Zuckerberg said:
“It’s been amazing to see how many people have used Facebook to build a real community and help each other in so many ways.”