How to Challenge Facebook’s Social Throne
A few weeks ago we got a first look at Facebook’s ‘little red book’, a guide handed to each new employee that describes the companies history, culture and future through a series of images and quotes. The one page that probably stood out, like an elephant in the room in the eyes of entrepreneurs, was the following:
What Facebook is trying to communicate to their new employees is that there is no such thing as permanently excellent companies, and although Facebook has been the benchmark for social media over the past decade, it is not immune to market trends and changes.
In fact, Facebook has spent 23 billion dollars over the past 3 years acquiring a pair of social networking companies (Whatsapp and Instagram) and putting a 3 billion dollar bid on another (Snapchat) just to protect its social throne.
The above scenarios are a dream for any social networking startup; being acquired or being in the position to turn down an acquisition offer (the latter has paid off handsomely for Snapchat). So how do you put yourself in a position to challenge Facebook’s Social Throne? Lets reverse engineer the strongest qualities of the acquisitions and bids above.
1: Challenge Facebook’s Core Features
It wasn’t too long ago that Facebook was the #1 photo sharing service in the world. Then along came Instagram, a standalone photo sharing application that helped capture the best moments in your life. One of the main reasons Facebook acquired Instagram, was because it challenged one of its core features, photo sharing. The same can be said for Whatsapp, which like Instagram, built a standalone of one of Facebook’s core features, messaging. Facebook’s mission statement is ‘to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected’, but how can they accomplish this if people aren’t using their platforms as a means of communication?
2: Build Single Purpose First-Class Experiences
Facebook was built in the pre-mobile world, therefore it was built on the ‘one does all’ approach of the web bundling different connecting and sharing features. Mobile however, changed everything from ease of access, to our behavioral habits with online services. This market shift lead to a change from the ‘one does all’ approach of websites, towards the single purpose experience of mobile. Services like Whatsapp and Instagram took one specific feature people really enjoyed (Photo sharing and Messaging), and created a first-class experience of that feature. The trend of unbundling Facebook’s big blue app will continue in the future, and they’ve given you 23 billion plus reasons to believe that, including the unbundling of their own messaging feature, now known as the separate app Messenger.
3: Target the Younger Demographic
What made Facebook successful in their early years was its appeal amongst the younger demographic. The same can be said in recent years for both Instagram and Snapchat. The younger demographic drove the success of these social networking services in their early years because of a chain reaction. Once one of the millennial age groups catches onto a service, it causes a chain reaction among the next generation of millennial age groups just coming into their own as digital consumers and so on and so forth. As mentioned above, irrelevancy can happen exceptionally fast in the digital world and the chain reaction amongst the younger demographic is where it all gets started.
4. Have a Global Mentality
Although Facebook started off as a service for only students at Harvard, it became evidently clear very early on that Facebook’s vision was to connect the world one place at a time, and they’re still on that mission. There is nothing wrong with building your product within a niche community like ‘The Facebook’ did at Harvard, but having a future global mentality is vital to your long term success. Facebook acquired Instagram and Whatsapp not only because they challenged their core features, created single purpose apps and targeted millennials, but because they also expanded upon its mission of connecting the world, Instagram through photos and Whatsapp through messaging.
5. Create Something People Want
Last, but not least, and probably the most important of the qualities listed above, is actually creating something people want. You want to create an experience that makes people wonder how they lived without it, a service that people communicate, share and engage with on a daily basis. Above all else, Facebook wants and needs people to continue using their services, whether it be on Facebook, Whatsapp or Instagram.
Whats Next?
Communication behaviors will continue to change and new means of communication will challenge the old successes. Will it be Public or Private? Words or Visuals? Feed based or thread-based? If you can pinpoint what will be the next means of communication, you just might be able to challenge Facebook’s Social Throne.
We could end this by telling you the uphill battle you would face, but we’d rather tell you to dream big.
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