Facebook – on the rise or fall?

by Guest Writer on March 25, 2008

Guest Post By Ildeniz Yagcioglu (E-mail / E-mail / Twitter)

Facebook LogoLots has been said…Lots has been written…How happy about having Facebook as a part of our daily lives?

I have recently been reading about the decrease in ‘active’ unique subscribers. The according to NMA.co.uk and others has continued to decrease for the second month in a row. Facebook argues that this is not the case and that in fact their ‘active’ user-base has improved.

Who is right, who is wrong on this issue?  Not really a point worth contending really, however, I would like to mention that as a marketer, I like to consider everyone’s reliable statistics not just Facebooks. To be fair, when I was reading one of my weekly Marketing Magazines; the latest issue of NMA (dated March 20th 2008), the statistics provided by Nielsen Online in Luan Goldie’s article make the recent fall pretty clear. Facebook had 8.9m unique users in December 2007 whereas it has dropped down to 8.3m in February 2008. Hitwise statistics on the other hand show that it is climbing up again.

Hitwise Statistics Facebook March 2008

Bebo, one of Facebook’s main competitors in the UK market seems to be on the rise, jumping 12% to 4.6m unique users in February. This may be due to the recent news of the buy-out by AOL or an improved marketing effort as proposed by Roger (News: AOL buys Bebo! UK loses largest home-grown player to the US)

. The audience has an increasing number of social networking sites and the offer on one only differs slightly from the other. The target audience can choose a different service provider anytime with little effort. It is easy to register, it is free and most of all, it is engaging and FUN!

But, going back to my original question - are we happy with Facebook as a part of our daily lives? Do you like receiving emails from the applications you have installed on your profile page, informing you who gave you flowers for your virtual garden, who fed your “virtual” pet that day, who rated you as the sexiest? Are we starting to get frustrated? Is that the reason why we are slowly leaving Facebook and choosing other media platforms?

There is a slightly darker side to engaging ‘fully’ with a social network such as Facebook too. Some senior managers use Facebook to find out what their employees are doing on their Facebook Profiles. Some even take a step further (argued to be 20%) and check the profiles of the job applicants. The latest news on this front is that Managers who make decisions could be influenced by the applicants’ profiles (around 60% of seniors) and current employees actions/ profiles on Facebook face getting banned. How this is going to be controlled or take action is a different question? Facebook I believe was unique and had a high entrance level (once upon a time, we could only register to the site if we had a University email account), now after opening fully they are definitely going through some tough times.

And the more they lower the barrier to enter the Facebook ‘club’, the worse I believe it will get.

What do you think?  Are you facing Facebook ‘fatigue’?

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Viewing 2 Comments

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    I think Facebook and many other Top Social Network will see slow movement of members. During that final quarter of 2008/early 2009, we will see rise of niche social network and members of Facebook/MySpace will use OpenID to represent at multiple networks.
    With this trend, the supremacy of one Social Network will see downward slope.

    We can apply the classic pattern of society into social network, for instance when there is a new land discovery, there is mass immigration towards it, then we settle down ...slowly we discover we belong to small community or move to another green pasture. I think the same pattern is already seen behind the reason why Bebo gaining more member and Facebook loosing it.
    I also think with OpenSocial initiative and many similar initiative, it will make easier for user to represent themselves by OpenID. I foresee OpenId enabling user to manage their own social contacts, privacy, messages, apps, etc.
    That's my 2 cents.
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    I know what you mean, I think OpenID is the key for users to get back the power we lost with Social Networks over our identity and also OpenID has the potential to make for much better tools by the service providers such as Facebook (social network) or WebJam (community network).

    With OpenID it allows multiple usernames and 'mini-ids' but with one cohesive confirmed identity that ties them all together allowing for 'Dashboard' style management of ones services, and privacy levels.

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