Facebook has become that app on my phone that I hardly ever check, unless I need to wish someone happy birthday. I favour other apps like Instagram and spend a considerable amount of time there as well. The last time I was on Facebook properly was on my commute home from work a while ago when I was all caught up on my Instagram feed. What I saw were mostly ads, articles that freakishly related to my interests and funny memes. It was clear to me that the spark and fun I use to have on this platform had fizzled out and is now overshadowed by businesses.
Facebook pages are common among businesses and are an effective way to reach their customers in a way that suits their changing lifestyles and allows for direct interaction with them. However, this becomes ineffective if their customers are spending less and less time on there. According to the Sensis Social Media Report 2017, the average amount of times Australians access Facebook has fallen from 32 to 25 times per week, which contrasts Instagrams rise from 23 to 38 times per week. This demonstrates how Facebook users are becoming disengaged with the platform and are using other outlets to connect with their friends.
Facebook took a step in the right direction earlier this year by moving towards prioritising posts from friends as opposed to business posts. This will allow the platform to be more social and could work to keep people more engaged. However, the extent of this change will need to be seen first to conclude whether this will have any impact on users’ declining usage.
Facebook needs to come up with some groundbreaking changes to the platform that will give them an edge over their competition. Instagram utilised the story concept onto their platform and in my opinion did a better job than Snapchat ever did. Instagram came through with innovative filters and allowed tagging before moving to the highlights concept where you can save your stories onto you profile to be viewed by your followers and prospective followers at any time. Facebook needs to think of a concept that will keep their users engaged and work in harmony with businesses so that there is a balance in both.
What about you, how do you feel about Facebook right now?
Image sourced: https://travelthefire.com/forcing-facebook-to-change-your-page-name/
Social Nimash 
Facebook will always be redeemed by the overwhelming majority of traffic being those who prioritise instant messaging. The same report suggests 81% of people use Facebook’s instant messaging system “Messenger”. Also I feel like the Sensis report demonstrates that Facebook’s growth is only slowed by its incredibly market share. Facebook can hardly grow when it already occupies 94% of the market where Instagram is still relatively new and many people are still adopting. Overall Facebook seems fine atm
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Yes Facebook’s Messenger app is the dominant messaging application used today, however the main Facebook platform itself has seen usage slip. While they do have colossal market share, they lost 1% of it this year and had less usage than the previous year. These statistics show that interest is waning for the platform. Also, the fact that Facebook publicly announced that they are moving toward showing users more posts from their friends is an indication that users aren’t engaged. While it may seem like Facebook is fine right now, there are symptoms of major issues and any business, especially in the digital space needs to be on top of it and fix the issues while they’re relatively minor.
Yes, Instagram is smaller compared to Facebook, however businesses are realising the potential in the platform and more and more users are adopting it as the increased usage statistics show.
Thank you for commenting and engaging with my post. Your perspective is refreshing and intriguing.
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I absolutely agree with this, recently Facebook has introduced their ‘stories’ feature however this was rather unsuccessful compared to Instagram, this illustrates the slow growth of Facebook; which demonstrates that Facebook is currently in it’s maturity stage of product lifespan.
Do you predict that Facebook will be expecting the decline stage soon or, do you reckon there is still room for another groundbreaking feature that will bring Facebook to it’s prime again?
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Yes I couldn’t agree more with what you’ve mentioned about Facebook stories, it definitely wasn’t adopted by many people who I’m friends with on Facebook.
I think that’s a really good point that Facebook’s reached the maturity stage in the product life cycle. I think Facebook has the ability to try another groundbreaking feature, however if it doesn’t work out there’s a possibility of decline.
The reason Facebook has such a great market share is because its synonymous with the population and almost everyone is on it and is a great place to stalk find someone, like a directory. However, recently there has been more emphasis on businesses and that’s what’s detracted from it. They still have a chance, but time is ticking.
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