Gone are the days when everyone would get excited to log onto Facebook and discover what their friends were up to. For many, this excitement was replaced by dread. This did not happen overnight, and Facebook might still have glimmers of hope.
What happened?
Mistrust happened. People stopped enjoying Facebook. Meta (Facebook’s parent company) will say that it has monthly active users, app downloads, messages, and all the success statistics, but look deep, and you will find many issues. Here are just a few:
- Misinformation: Either caused by ignorance or purposely implanted, misinformation reigns supreme. Even though Facebook has tried to curb it, the levels of misinformation are so abundant that no effort will ever be enough.
- Ageism: Ask anyone below 30 if they use Facebook, and most will give you a look of disgust. Facebook is where the parents, family members, and “old people” are.
- Spam: Ask any community manager on Facebook about this. Levels of spam are off the charts. Every day, I remove 15 to 30 spam comments. Most are copied and pasted in the most recent posts.
- Wants to be Everything: Facebook, over time, has tried being everything to everyone. From videos, gaming, shopping, stories, and instant messaging. This leads to…
- Fatigue: There are only so many hours in the day, and we can only pay attention to so many things. Every platform is competing for our attention. As a result, many seek a way to disconnect from social media (even if some don’t admit it).
- Privacy Concerns: These concerns exist for all platforms online that exchange personal data one way or another. Meta will explain their privacy practices, yet people still mistrust how this data is handled.
Glimmers of Hope
I feel Facebook’s hay day already passed several years ago. Moving forward, it should simplify its offering and try to return to its roots, win user trust, and pull its sister platforms in.
- Customization: Offer me options to customize my newsfeed. We’ve liked many pages and sources of content, but over time they disappear from our newsfeeds, even if actively posted. Let me have more than one newsfeed and make it easy to curate each.
- Groups: The Facebook feature I enjoy the most! I find better professional groups on Facebook than I do on LinkedIn. The same goes for some niche and cultural interest communities. So instead of going through the usual route, I bookmark some of these pages and just go directly to them.
- Instagram: Serve Instagram feed content onto the Facebook newsfeed. Why not? This should be a highly customizable experience that the user can easily curate.
- Replace Messenger with WhatsApp: Less is more. WhatsApp has substantial brand equity, and its functionalities could be imported onto Facebook. Maybe this could bring Facebook defectors back to the platform.
Will Facebook ever leave us? Eventually, yes, like most things, it comes and goes. Maybe it will go through a big evolution into something else (Metaverse, perhaps?). Yet I don’t see it happening anytime soon. Facebook has suffered a big blow to its brand equity over the last few years, and it has a lot of healing to do. Embracing its strengths could be the key instead of integrating every innovation with haste to stay afloat. Instead, give your core users what they want, and leverage the brand equity of your sister platforms.
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