Are the seeds of Facebook’s ultimate downfall being sown by its very success?
The thought has been provoked by a chance meeting in the real world. I bumped into an old friend in a shop last weekend. “Ah! I recognise you from Facebook,” I joked.
“Not any more you won’t,” she said. “I’ve committed Facebook suicide. It was all getting too much.”
She has deleted her profile. And we chatted about the downside of a social media site like Facebook once its connectedness proves so pervasive that it feels like it’s smothering you.
Then I found that she is part of a trend – the US blog Creative Capital has written up the latest numbers worldwide for user engagement and it’s slowing down for all the big social network sites.
You can see why. People you once met at a party (but have forgotten), third cousins on your in-laws’ side, and people who you shared a course with, all saying: ‘hello, let me in to your world and on to your wall’.
Very quickly, it seems, that benefit Facebook offers of re-making contact with long-forgotten or well-dispersed friends, can turn into a feeling of claustrophobia, taking the pleasure and the feeling of being in-control out of it.
“Facebook is a real chore,” commented another friend. “Your heart sinks when you sit down knowing you have to reply to all these people who’ve asked you questions like, how are you?, and gave news of their own.”
No doubt Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg will be wrestling with this threat, and the emotional and psychological triggers which cause a tipping point from passionate advocate to irritated ex-user.
After all, no-one has worked out quite how its 175m users are going to make the kind of profits its investors expect.
According to Wikipedia, in October 2008, Zuckerberg said: “I don’t think social networks can be monetized in the same way that search did. … In three years from now we have to figure out what the optimum model is. But that is not our primary focus today.”
New advertising propositions on Facebook do offer incredibly targeted opportunities to online marketers to reach communities of say, caravan users or fans of a certain band. None of the wastage that advertising traditionally brings with it.
But Zuckerberg’s challenge is to give his creation that ‘stickiness’ which marketers desire – without making the Facebooker feel like a fly caught in a sticky spider’s web.
Tags: creative capital, Facebook, Manchester, social networking
