Facebook launched in 2004.
In just 7 odd years, it now has a global “membership” of between 500-600 million people and a line of companies desperate to hand over tens of millions of their dollars for some sort of marketing association.
Who cares that a significant proportion of their audience are seemingly very casual – if at all – users, or that [arguably] the most significant and influential country on earth has almost 3 times the population of Facebook and yet they never access it, mainly because they can’t.
Don’t get me wrong, I like Facebook, but that is what I think is it’s ultimate downfall.
OK, not because I like it personally – but I’m sure that doesn’t help – but because if the average age of people who originally signed up were say, 18 – they’re 25 now and in ten years time they’ll be 35 and then 10 years after that, 45 [see how good at maths I am] and let’s be honest, as the younger generations come online [literally and metaphorically] it’s pretty unlikely they’re going to want to hang where their embarrassing parents are socialising.
Yes I know there are ways around it and that many people are doing it now … plus to claim Facebook will disappear is wrong, because I can see them being around in some form for decades [so that’s the headline of this post screwed] … however as with many things in life, as the user base gets older the appeal to the younger generations gets weaker [which is dangerous for Facebook as many marketers like it because they think it’s the playground of youth, regardless of how accurate this is or not] and so unless Facebook manage this very well [which will be additionally difficult given the massive base of 30+ people who will be camped out there] I foresee a time where we will have a totally new ‘holy grail’ social hub, which is why if I was a company investing hundreds of millions of dollars into Facebook advertising, I’d be holding some back and trying to invest it into the creation of Facebook 2.0 rather than just adopting a passive attitude and waiting till someone else makes billions from it.
Sure it’s risky, sure it’s out of their core competency – plus I’m talking about something that might happen in 10-20 years down the line – but for all the talk of future planning, I am always surprised how few marketing/agency/media companies actually do anything about it, favouring to switch to whichever channel is winning the battle of the day/month/year like they’re some Italian soldier in a World War. [Sorry Mum, that was just a joke]