The advantages of Social network in comparison with websites and Google
How user generated content sites are winning?
So what is the killing point of social network in comparison with normal websites and even the internet search engine like Google? It all about the generation of data and information.
Let’s stop for a while and look at the time where websites started to become a fever. At this time, a person can only go to the website if only they know the website address first. Thus, the very first version of Google was launched as the “yellow page” for the World Wide Web. But the core value of the product Google itself is its crawled data from websites and the engine to display user’s search results at the most relevant level. In order to rank those results, Google had to collect as much data as possible to understand the context of the keywords provided. However, the flow of information and technology has gradually affect Google’s advantages, to be specific, their data collected. Seeing threats of losing potential data coming, Google has always tried to secure their spot in the game. In 2007, the world rumbled when Steve Jobs introduced the first iPhone with its own iOS. Knowing the risk of losing data of the mobile users to the control Apple, Google has no choice but to acquired Android and got into this business a year later. Later on, Google Waze, Buzz, and Plus were launched from 2009 to 2011 respectively in an attempt to challenge other growing social network like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. However, they were never successful and were completely shut down recently as a result. At the moment, the advantage of social network, where contents are continuously generated by users, were fully showed.
In 2014, learning the result from IBM or Nokia, Google restructured itself to become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Alphabet Inc, a new holding company headed up by former bosses of Google. Is this the sign of Google has reached its peak as top officers want to change their future investment in other products? Time will answer this question, but Google is continuing to losses their customers in products that serve a specific purpose.
Recently, economic experts started to notice Amazon effect, and how it alters the habit of people searching for a product online, as there is a notable migration of search activity gravitating towards the online marketplace from search engines like Google. From 2015 to 2018, Amazon surprisingly surpassed Google for product search queries. To be more specific, in 2015, the proportion of customers searching for products on Google and Amazon is 54% and 46% respectively; but after 3 years, this number has completely reversed, with the winning belonged to Amazon. According to Paul Dalton, an international chief media officer of digital agency DigitasLBi, the consumer journeys were more likely, to begin with Amazon rather than Google. Continuing to explain, he said, “As a first step, they search within Amazon, looking at products and reviews from a trusted source that Amazon is very well known for. They will either use Amazon to purchase it or jump over to a brand site to look at other products from that brand.”
A point to notice, it was not the fact that Google didn’t foresee this upcoming trend, they have tried to convey customers to search for their desired product on google, by the launching of Google merchant center, and combine with Google AdWords for products to be displayed on their results page, or later called Google Shopping in 2009. However, the recent statistics discussed above has shown the gradual winning of Amazon over Google Shopping in the US market, due to the fact that customer journey in Amazon’s site is proved to be much more relevant and complete, from the information provided, product recommended to the environment that they wholefully created for their consumers. On the other hand, consumers are now getting used to finding hotel information on Agoda, Trivago or Hotel.com; or let’s say in Vietnam, Foody is well-known place for finding F&B stores, or Batdongsan.com.vn is one of the best portals to find information about real estate.
So what are the advantages of these sites above, whose contents are focus on a specific field and users are able to participate in creating content? First of all, users will generally go to websites where they interact with the “society”, create their own contents, read from the others. This is the natural demand of human beings throughout history — social desirability. And secondly, it is those websites who have user-generated content own their most valuable asset, user data. You might have read numerous article written about the important of data, and even big data, we are not going to mention about it much here. However, for your demonstration, what do you think is the reason for Facebook, and large shopping sites like Amazon, Lazada, Tiki, can give you recommendations and search results that interested enough for you to take a look at them? Yes, you are right, it is big data. From analyzing a large huge number of data point, these websites are able to recommend you with the result that matches you the most. Think of it like when you have your friend, who is an experienced car dealer, gives you a recommendation for your new car. The more detail you tell him, the more chance that cars he recommended will match with your ideal vehicle. For this reason, recommendation systems can only work at it best when it is backed with big data from you, the consumer, and these data should be updated at much as possible. This is the reason why Facebook, which owns many of your history and fresh generated information, can able to give such related posts and videos that you will likely to watch. Or in the case of the Amazon, through reviews of real users, your history, and the patterns of which other users usually bought along with an item, it can give you suggested products relevant to your intended buying item(s); or when you search for a product, you will be introduced to those which are made from your reference brands, with highest customer reviews, and are ready to be delivered from your near location for example. And as we discussed above, this is the main reason for people in the US choose to start searching for a product on Amazon instead of Google, where the information is left unstructured, with no relevant context or specialization to give most suitable results for a person’s searched keyword.
Therefore, the evolution of digital society and specific demands has lead to the notable development of social platforms that has high content relevancy over a specific area, and effective search engine. Google, as discussed above, is one of the most famous cases to prove the emergence of this technology wave. Facebook groups are appearing due to the fact that there are lack of appropriate channels for demanded user to participate in. Thus, there are such potential places for new players, and it really comes down to the question of if a specific demand of an area is large enough to build up a dedicated platform or not, and is that platform introduced in the right place, and at the right time?
Michael Le — Phuc Pham
The Comspaces Team
