Facebook Wants More Of Everything
Starting off as an experiment in college, Facebook has now become the grand acquirer of the world’s most trending apps soon after its latest addition Tbh an anonymous teen complementing app. The immediate reaction to this move was- ‘Whoa! That was quick!’ Without wasting any time, Facebook cracked a deal looking at the popularity of the app.
In the very first month, Tbh was ranked as the number #1 app on the App store and as of today, it ranks number #6 after Facebook which is quite outstanding for a 9-week old app.
In the app world, Facebook is dominating the market of social apps by taking on huge challenges and planning for prosperity. The scale of Facebook’s audience is unbelievable with over 2 billion users every month, which is literally half of all internet users. That’s excluding the users on Whatsapp which has grown from 450 million to 1.3 billion active members and Instagram that has grown by 10 times to 800 million users.
The specialty that keeping users hooked to Facebook is the content. Initially, it started out only with personal sharing options- Statuses, Thoughts, Feelings and then moved on to Photos. During this time, the company realized people like to keep their conversations private so they developed the messenger app- which was again a huge success. Post this, when they saw the photo-sharing app Instagram gain traction and played a smart move by not killing the brand and letting it run the way it used to. Today Facebook has reached a phase where you can share articles, videos and images that are created by other media organisations but can be seeded onto the platform.
From the commercial point of view, Facebook has been favorably well at gaining customers. Businesses may not have a website but they sure do have a facebook page. Facebook is known to have incredible power and influence over all the new brands.
The next big thing that Facebook wants to incorporate is artificial intelligence and machine learning. Facebook and Instagram already use AI to provide a personalised feed, identify photo tagging and translation of posts. The company doing rigorous research on AI and has already developed a technology that recognizes objects- even different breeds of dogs- in photos and videos.
Facebook is so powerful today that it has well-planned strategies for its expansion. The company has a knack for buying out applications based companies and monetize on it in future. Facebook and Instagram were ad-free when they launched but now they are filled with business promotions. Even WhatsApp has started monetizing with WhatsApp for Business.
With this tactic, the company entices users to remain engaged on the app while it makes money from businesses. Businesses have a budget of increasing their customer base and Facebook offers features for the same. It is one of their important channels of generating money.
Facebook has been chasing Snapchat that has 100 million daily active users for a while now. Since they could not buy it out, they cloned it and tried incorporating some of Snapchat’s popular features into its existing apps. This move has been fruitful on Instagram but not so much on Whatsapp and Facebook.
Facebook has been incredibly aggressive at buying or cloning challenger technologies. Anyone that looks like a threat gets acquired just like it acquired positively focused polling startup Tbh did. The app lets people anonymously answer kind-hearted multiple-choice questions about friends who then receive the poll results as compliments.
Tbh is popular amongst teens and high school children and in limited time, tbh paced to almost 1 billion poll answers. The co-creator Nikita Bier said in an interview, “If we’re improving the mental health of millions of teens, that’s a success to us.” In just about 3 months, the app scored 5 million downloads with 2.5 million users and has strong potential for expanding.
If you’ve watched the Netflix TV show 13 reasons why you’ll understand the emotional trauma that teenagers go through because of silly comments passed by their peers. Looking at the intensity of the problem, having an app that compliments you is just what we need. Tbh is exactly catering to this problem.
It is interesting that Facebook opted to buy Tbh instead of cloning it as it has been been copying other popular teen apps. The reason behind this could be Tbh’s strong brand name, unique design and massive early traction. The company saw potential in the app hence it partnered with it instead of fighting it.
When it came to Instagram and Whatsapp, Facebook acquired them at a later stage where they had both climbed to $1 billion and $19 billion. Facebook swooped in on time to buy out Tbh before Snapchat could eye it. Facebook has goals for making Tbh the next Instagram, with the way it is flowing looks like it will accomplish this soon.
The company now holds 36% stake in the social media sites ranked worldwide by the number of users with Facebook making 18%, Facebook messenger and Whatsapp holding 7% and Instagram holding 4%.
The Future
Social networking apps have vast potential today and facebook clearly knows that. Even though their real influence has reduced in the social space they don’t want to revamp but instead want to expand through various trending apps.
Facebook does not want to miss out on anything!
