Facebook: The Giant of Glass Feet
Facebook’s empire is tumbling down. Gone are the times when Facebook constituted the capital of social media networks. Its fall, however, is not a common one and the gradual fall that it met was more strategic than periodic.
Facebook’s late success was based upon the fact that it possessed all the right mixtures of social features. It allowed you to connect with friends and family, new people, co-workers, shops, enterprises, and many more. Soon, though, other social media giants realised that what they thought was a Social Colossus, was, in fact, merely a weak opponent, once they investigated Facebook’s features individually and not collectively.
Mind that all the names, logos, and titles of Companies, Applications, and Networks bellow are used solely in the role of examples and references. Many more names would fit for the purpose of the text, but only a select few were chosen, by the criterion of popularity, for ease’s sake.
The Features
Starting of with what once was Facebook’s prime and only goal, connecting people. Facebook, like its name suggests, was meant to be an agenda of faces — people — that would give them the ability to communicate with each other.
There’s a reason why this aspect of Facebook was put first on the list. That is, it may be the only elements in its network that it has proudly retained and still offers in the best of ways; that of personal communication.
Next, there’s advertising. In the past couple of years, online advertising has skyrocketed and, once businesses realised the influence that Facebook’s feed had on its users, they jumped onboard in a heartbeat. Millions of pages, both legitimate and fake, were created in the name of promoting their product, service, event etc. and many of them did, in fact, get the estimated attention — if not even more.
Another major aspect of Facebook, or, rather, a decoration to its other aspects, were media. Both individuals and companies would use photos, videos, URLs — and later on, more advanced media elements like SoundCloud tracks available for playback directly from Facebook’s platform, or gifs and Instant Articles (i.e. Articles optimised exclusively for mobile use) — to enrich their content and influence. Facebook’s media library owes its rapid expansion almost exclusively to third-party-app integration, like Spotify, Soundcloud, Youtube etc, which constantly try to update their interconnection even further, essentially creating one major platform consisting of more, smaller ones.
There was also a time — not too long ago — when companies had truly trusted Facebook to be the right platform for their professional affairs and communications. The past tense in this particular point isn’t to imply that companies don’t still manage and daily update their Facebook posts, but it’s to point out that their trust has certainly shrunk a great deal. In fact, this may very well be the aspect in which Facebook has suffered its greatest lost; its professional audience.
The Replacements
Were we to retain the order of aspects as applied above, we would have to begin with a replacement to Facebook’s connection feature. As mentioned previously, though, this is the only aspect that Facebook still holds best, so no direct replacement shall be attributed here.
As regards advertising, it goes without saying that ads have taken over almost every corner of the internet, and Facebook makes for merely a fraction of that sum. From Youtube videos, to the major News websites and Google searches, advertisements are ubiquitous to all of those posts. One thing that may no be evident, however, is how Facebook’s ad crowd has shrunk when one looks specifically at material products. It wasn’t uncommon to find product reviews in Facebook, and many people would search the product they were interested in (probably ending up on an unofficial Facebook Page of the name of the particular product), and then read what other users had commented on it after their experiences.
If this pattern sounds familiar to some readers, it’s because it is now part of Facebook’s main replacement in the field of product sales, i.e., Amazon.
Were a simple every-day user asked “whence do you consume media?”, chances are their first reply wouldn’t be “Facebook”. Videos are traditionally published on Youtube’s servers, Music is found on thousands of online streaming services, Spotify, Google Music, SoundCloud, iTunes etc., and Articles belong to either major Publications (Newspapers, or Magazines) or digital Publications ofter housed in some major publishing platforms, like Medium and Wordpress.
Images deserve some extra attention, as this was the first media piece that Facebook began losing control of.
The Social Media giant was quick to notice this and soon replied with a brave purchase; that of Instagram. Facebook realised that it no longer made for the best image-posting platform, it decided to buy its rival. It’s worth noting that Snapchat has, too, taken a strong position in the Media sector, too. Still its territory remains somewhat blurry, so , it shouldn’t be categorised as absolutely as the other Networks.
Allies helping the Nemeses
Besides Instagram that Facebook had no choice but to befriend it, there’s another Network that Facebook wasn’t capable of controlling. And the most ironic part of all, was that it was its own creation. That would be no other but its Messenger app. It’s amazing what huge influence the independence of this app has had on Facebook’ users. Countless people soon realised how much better the stand-alone Messenger app was, compared to Facebook. They found themselves not opening the Facebook app at all, and, in some cases, even deleting it. Essentially, like with Instagram, Messenger eventually shifted Facebook’s audience and made its users realised what they needed more; Facebook feed, or pure communication.
Whether or not the purchase of Instagram and the success of Messenger stack enough funds to cover the loses Facebook suffered from migrating photo-posters and chat-lovers respectively, is up to its financial experts to decide.
The Eternal Rival
A little bird once came knocking on Facebook’s door and soon became its worst nightmare.
Twitter has always been the major alternative to Facebook, and vice versa, but, the latter was hitherto covered in this fight. Facebook was once strong due to its feature conglomerate. However, as thoroughly explained above, many networks are now individually offering those sets of features in a much richer and overall better manner than Facebook tried to collect in one place. This is why Facebook is now in a position of weakness. Twitter always was — and most probably will remain — what it was; the prospective user knew what Twitter can do and what Facebook could do; the user had a choice. But the latter has lowered its standards, leaving the user a much narrower set of choices, were they to go Facebook’s way.
Comparing Facebook with Twitter is clearly a naive and invalid action for someone who wants to put the two under the microscope. If, though, we were to make any sort of comparison between the two, the only legitimate one would be in terms of their goals; or, simply, what they do best. (see “The Fall”)
Business Exclusive
A remark regarding modern social media, dedicated to the modern business audience.
Only rarely does an app replace one of Facebook’s features ever so directly as in the case on the business sector of Facebook. LinkedIn is, without any doubt, everything that Facebook would dream about its Business version. Twitter and LinkedIn together, make for almost the whole competition for Facebook’s business audience. Both feature mechanics that Facebook’s core model just cannot support and that’s why the Business Element will never be as strong in Facebook as it is on the other two.
To be fair, Facebook did make an effort to keep its business dream alive, evidently through its Business-specific app, but the results were minimal.
The Fall
Facebook has been silently taken over by not one major competitor, but many small ones. They realised they could take up Facebook in a specific piece of its Network, and they did. One of them wouldn’t make a difference, but a hundred-time multitude of this strategy
is enough to make the giant bend the knee. Facebook may think that such Network are working under friendly terms, making their Network more and more connected with each other, but that doesn’t alter the supremacy that they enjoy beyond Facebook.
If the reader is an old-school Facebook user, it would be proper to take a moment and revise the image of Facebook as it is now. It’s not easy to accept that something has changed over the years, but the facts speak for themselves.
But, by no means, is the Company’s only change across the years just the one on their logo.
Whether one still enjoys the Personal feel of Facebook and doesn’t care about not having support of Business Affairs, or they prefer the clarity and simplicity of Networks like Twitter or LinkedIn, is entirely a matter of personal preference. The only fact that is not up for debate is that Facebook isn’t anymore as superior, as it is inferior to the mass of the other Networks that are slowly gaining a stable position in the 21st cyber century.
Fortunately for the Giant, its users are still gradually increasing and, honestly, no one should argue with that. (Graph provided by GraphiQ, link bellow)
(https://w.graphiq.com/w/hsDZW5rjUbz)
What people should keep in mind, though, is what Facebook truly is. In other words, to know its limits. Facebook can only do so much for one’s personal connections. Anything beyond that should be part of other Network available.
