(for convenient reading, all external links in this article open in a new browser tab)
So: Facebook has started pushing their users to download and install the separate “Messenger” app by now. Users seem to greatly despise this, as the consistently bad reviews on the AppStore show (ratings look slightly better on GooglePlay), and I thought: “Interesting”. Why would they piss off their users?”
When trying to find articles written about the topic online, I stumbled across a recent article on Gizmodo, titled “Facebook’s App Strategy Is Bad News For Anyone Who Uses Apps“.
In this article, Kate Knibbs was pulling up a whole bunch of good reasons why the messaging function was swapped out, all pretty much centered around the core thought it could be because “… Facebook wants to dominate the app ecosystem, and it’s way easier to do that with a bunch of popular apps than one.”
That would make a lot of sense, no doubt. Filling up memory and app space on users’ gadgets and home screens under the umbrella of one powerful brand might be indeed a way to “colonize your entire app collection” (Knibbs).
But unlike the idea of a slotting fee charged by supermarkets for scarce shelf space, the available space on mobile devices is not that scarce. Every new device generation is liekly to feature more space, more memory, and more possibilities to organize the app icons in meaningful ways.
It might be that the explanation is much simpler: we may just be looking at Facebook’s latest take on behavioural segmentation. Here’s how this line of thought could work.
There are two types of Facebook users: those who use chat and IM functions, and those who don’t. Those who use chat and IM functionalities are likely to keep their peers close, and if the communication network is organized on personal tokens like mobile phone numbers instead of platform tokens (user credentials for a social network) the whole network organization can easily switch towards P2P authentication instead of platform membership and exposure. In other words: chatters might be dead meat for Facebook.
Those who don’t use messaging and IM functions are possible more likely to focus their attention on the things showing up in their news feed. And we can see, according to own experience, recent articles and common success stories, a whole new world of automated content generation and distribution that is focusing on user’s timeline contents.
Over the course of the past two years we have seen reports that Facebook’s demographic structure is changing: they seem to be losing active users in the younger age groups (below 24), and they are gaining weight in the segment of 45+, at least in the US, according to this graph posted on Mashable1:
On a side note: The graph in this IBTimes article picks up the notion that there is a shift in the users’ interest profiles, too: Sex and Drugs and Rock’n Roll have seen massive shifts in interest percentages (“sex”: 230% growth, “drugs”: -72%, and “rock’n roll”: a whopping 5852%). It seems as if Facebook users really are getting older. Or are getting more risk-averse 🙂
If we pull these indications together we can assume the following structures to be at work here:
(1) the younger demographic is more interested in point-to-point, real-time communication, and flocks to alternative chat services like SnapChat, WhatsApp, WeChat, and services like Instagram. They follow the crowd, and they try to escape their relatives. If you happen to have a 14-year-old around you, it is likely that (s)he will tell you that “After all, there is nothing cool about having parents and grandparents “liking” pictures of your friends.” (IBTimes).
In addition: private messaging just seems to be a lot safer, and happens within very tightly knitted networks. Online bullying in social networks has become a phenomenon, and new services are offering built-in technical counter measures: Snapchat makes the sent images (“snaps”) disappear after a few seconds, so public embarrassment would not be as likely as with tagging people on drunk party images on Facebook. Needless to say that third-party apps have already taken on this topic, allowing to save snaps without the sender knowing.
(2) Those people remaining on Facebook will have less incentives to use Facebook beyond their Timeline contents. Their predominant actions are liking and commenting on things. Which can be used to refine the targeting mechanisms for what is so often labeled euphemistically as “relevant content”.
(3) The demographic shift on Facebook brings in a lot of wealth, simply as the purchase power in that segment is a lot bigger than in the demographic segment of the less than 24-year olds.
(4) Facebook’s ability to target geographic and demographic segments has increased tremendously, and users’ newsfeed actions are the fuel that keeps this fire burning.
(5) As the topics of “Advanced segmenting”, “lookalike audiences” and “automated content generation” show, the nature of the timeline content has changed a lot. The dutiful logging of click actions enhances and refines audience compositions by the minute.
With freshly unlocked demographics the nature of the advertised things can easily turn from products to services. And audiences can easily be enhanced from “personally known” to “very likely interested”. As THIS article has it, the use of “custom audience” and “lookalike audience”, combined with precise local targeting, yielded quite impressive results for advertising health services and routine health checkups, such as this one2:
Under the “Facebook Business” topic of “Advanced Advertising” a whole bunch of clever targeting solutions has emerged in Facebook, and the yearly “Innovation Competition” amongst Facebook’s “Preferred Marketing Developers” is creating an impressive roster of services and products that offer content marketing-related help, such as: “Our application monetizes the Newsfeed” (Socialflow), or “Maverick is an Automated Marketing Platform that plans, creates and executes result-based, micro-budget, marketing campaigns for small businesses, for a fraction of the cost of a full service agency.”
The (automatically fed) newsfeed is Facebook’s new gold mine, it seems. And Facebook aims at optimizing its monetization further and further. In order to do so, they require an audience that it bound to click on things in their newsfeed rather than exchanging trivialities with their peers.
Just this morning I read an article about where this can lead to (on Facebook), where a person simply “liked” everything in their newsfeed (regardless of their true feelings towards the contents): “After checking in and liking a bunch of stuff over the course of an hour, there were no human beings in my feed anymore. It became about brands and messaging, rather than humans with messages.” (Mat Honan on Wired; via a commented article on the Social Fixer blog.
Needless to say I didn’t dare to like that article on Facebook. Or to share it on Wired. But, Mat Honan and Matt Kruse: here you have my appreciation for your take on the topic expressis verbis. As this post contains links to the articles, I am sure the Backlink tracking will take a good record of my appreciative action.
—
1 Article here: http://mashable.com/2014/01/16/teens-leaving-facebook/
2 Article here: https://www.facebook.com/business/success/piedmont-healthcare