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Did social media even exist before Facebook? It did, of course – nods to MySpace and Second Life – but to all intents and purposes Facebook is the OG of social media.
Yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg’s baby turned 20 and, 3.1 billion users later, it’s a moment of reflection for all of us working in the world of online and brands.
Facebook has changed dramatically over two decades.
For Facebook has changed dramatically over those two decades. What started life in a Harvard dorm room as a way to connect students through an online portal has morphed into something almost unrecognisable today. That original concept was very firmly rooted in what we think of today as online communities.
Above: From small beginnings, Mark Zuckerberg has seen Facebook grow into a social media behemoth.
Facebook made the classic marketing move of gaining traction with youth, setting a culture that became embedded, and one which others followed.
As it evolved and grew, so too did its ambition. For where people go, the money goes – and that means advertising. Agencies working with brands quickly looked at how they could reach groups of people on the platform who shared common interests that fitted with their brand.
[Facebook] has become much more of an advertising product than a pleasant human experience.
In the early days this manifested in trying to engage with relatively niche groups of followers and fans. Depending on the brand, building a fan base could be quite a challenge, but it was a platform that allowed you to humanise brands, and that was an advertising game-changer.
Today, as Facebook remains one of the biggest social media platforms on the planet, scale is its main selling point. But it has become much more of an advertising product than a pleasant human experience. As its business model has evolved the company's shareholder agenda has usurped the consumer's agenda, and that has significantly altered the user experience.
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Above: Facebook's shareholder interests have usurped its interest in user experience.
And then there is the data. Few businesses can rival Facebook for what it knows about its users. Whether that’s a good thing or not is open to interpretation, and Facebook has run into choppy waters around data privacy. But it has also meant a degree of ad personalisation that we hadn’t really encountered before.
From data breaches to election misinformation, Facebook’s attitude to its publisher responsibilities has been, at times, controversial.
At its peak, Facebook was the first thing anyone opened on their phones. But the increasingly ad cluttered environment – how long before you see anything from a person you care about on your news feed now – has changed that, and its lost some of the brand trust it built. From data breaches to election misinformation, Facebook’s attitude to its publisher responsibilities has been, at times, controversial.
We saw this again at the recent hearing before Congress, when Zuckerberg demonstrated his continued dissonance around his company’s responsibility toward young people’s online safety. So, while his opening statement said existing scientific work showed no causal link between using social media and young people having worse mental health, he did directly apologise to victims’ parents present, saying he was “sorry for everything they had all been through”.
Above: The scale of Facebook's data has meant previously unseen personalisation online.
So, while Facebook’s modus operandi has focused on keeping users on the platform for as long as possible, rather than helping them connect with people, it has alienated many. New social media platforms have evolved to better meet the needs of younger generations.
Big social remains the mass medium option, but brands looking for a more connected approach may need to look elsewhere. While closed communities don’t work from an advertising perspective, specialised communities do. Creating engaging content that feels more like one-to-one dialogue is at the essence of the best online brand work – it’s about finding that sweet spot of shared interest.
Big social remains the mass medium option, but brands looking for a more connected approach may need to look elsewhere.
On specialised communities – from those for mums to pet owners – there is a rich opportunity for brands to add value instead of looking for a straight advertising approach. Online communities are a safe space for people with shared interests, and while brands need to respect that and recognise the platform specifics, when treated appropriately, they offer new levels of engagement and response.
Above: Other social media platforms have evolved over the last two decades to rival Facebook's supremacy.
For instance, Westfield shopping centres created a very targeted campaign for its Kids Eat Free half term initiative that it ran on the mums’ community Peanut. Because this community is very strict on the brand partners it works with, the relevancy of any advertising is extremely high and lands better with the members.
Indeed, because communities are often not ad-funded but subscription based, they can be much more purposeful about the brands they are willing to accept as advertisers.
As Facebook has aged, and social media has matured, the way people behave on it has changed.
As Facebook has aged, and social media has matured, the way people behave on it has changed. Brands’ content strategies need to take all this into account – to best meet people’s needs and the brand proposition.
Of course, there are times when a more mass broadcast form of advertising works best online, but there are also increasingly times when brands can benefit from more specialised arenas.
