B1BLOG

Recent arti­cles, news and com­men­tary got me think­ing about how the whole land­scape of social media is shift­ing and that mobile is key to how peo­ple will use and inter­act with social media which will affect every­one oper­at­ing in this space, includ­ing Facebook.

See­ing this chart from Chetan Sharma Con­sult­ing makes me think that the world has gone slightly mad if there are more mobile devices out there than peo­ple who have access to fresh water.

The growth of smart­phones – espe­cially over the last few years – has been phe­nom­e­nal. And it is these devices that are the norm for the con­sumers of tomor­row (i.e. the teens of today).

Some recent stats from the lat­est Cisco VNI Mobile Research make scary read­ing. In 2011, mobile data traf­fic was 8 times greater than all of the entire global Inter­net traf­fic in 2000 (597 petabytes vs. 75 petabytes). That was only a dozen years ago, but it may as well have been eons. Within a few years Smart­phones will account for nearly 50% of all web traf­fic. Given the num­ber of mobile devices in the world is near­ing the amount of peo­ple on our planet, that is one hell of a lot of smartphones.

Trend: Lap­tops and Smart­phones Lead Traf­fic Growth (Source: Cisco VNI Mobile Research)

This raises a few more questions.

Have we finally reached “the year of the mobile”? Why did Face­book buy Insta­gram? Will HTML5 get round com­pat­i­bil­ity issues across vary­ing mobile plat­forms or be another flash in the pan that didn’t amount to much (like WebOS)?

But whilst mobile is spread­ing like wild­fire, recent data and arti­cles have talked about the demise (or not) of social read­ers, the decline of Zynga and the growth in video shar­ing plat­forms. Are all of these telling us some­thing about a shift that is happening?

Is Face­book on the way out and are we start­ing to get fed up of its intru­sive­ness and its big brother atti­tudes towards pro­vid­ing con­tent that “is right for us”?

Are Face­book wor­ried that as web usage becomes more and more preva­lent through mobile that their cur­rent platform/app is not fit for purpose?

When Face­book launched, MySpace had become old, messy and unus­able and quickly lost crit­i­cal mass. Is the same about to hap­pen to Face­book with the growth of less struc­tured plat­forms such as Pin­ter­est and Tumblr?

Other recent trends also add to the over­all pic­ture that things are chang­ing. Social read­ers launched in a blaze of glory last year (Built on Facebook’s Open Graph Plat­form). Trou­ble is, you like a few pages and sud­denly your time­line is filled up with arti­cles they [Face­book] think you should be read­ing. And users are tail­ing off rapidly, as peo­ple get fed up of being lectured.

John Her­mann from Buz­zfeed writes “And god, why would I sign up for the thing that seems to have tricked its way into my time­line? It’s an app that broad­casts Inter­net illit­er­acy for every­one to see.”

We know Face­book are con­stantly tweak­ing their algo­rithms and they are test­ing the con­cept of fewer trend­ing arti­cles and shorter feeds. They also claim that whilst users are down, engage­ment lev­els are up. Facebook’s response to the recent swathe of arti­cles on this “We’re try­ing to get the right con­tent in front of peo­ple, to up the sig­nal to noise ratio.” (Quote from Mash­able)

Whilst this would seem an altru­is­tic endeavor, for higher signal-to-noise ratio, read higher engage­ment lev­els. For high engage­ment lev­els, read more adver­tis­ing dollars.

So are peo­ple being put off by social read­ers or are they get­ting bored of Face­book and run­ning off to the next shiny bright object?

Maybe. I recently asked my daugh­ter if she wanted a Face­book account, to which she replied: “I am not sure I want Face­book, it’s for old peo­ple and they con­trol things too much!”

Per­haps some young peo­ple don’t have any sense of own­er­ship or sense of belong­ing to Face­book? Is its rigid con­trol over look and feel, force­ful imple­men­ta­tion of new fea­tures and opaque secu­rity model alien­at­ing the next gen­er­a­tion of users?

It is hard to be defin­i­tive but there are many signs that things are chang­ing and that Face­book has to change. Con­sumer habits are chang­ing in the way they use the web and social media in par­tic­u­lar, any of the social media plat­forms have to adapt to stay ahead of the curve, espe­cially as new – and dif­fer­ent – com­peti­tors enter the market.

The growth of mobile and Social 3.0

Lat­est Com­score data shows that whilst Face­book main­tains a huge lead in terms of aver­age min­utes per vis­i­tor, aggres­sive new kids on the block like Tum­blr and Pin­ter­est (despite the recent copy­right furore) are mak­ing inroads into their ‘face time’, leav­ing other estab­lished play­ers like Twit­ter far behind.

Source: BI Intel­li­gence, Comscore

To counter these threats, and knock out another quickly grow­ing com­peti­tor, and one that had grown even quicker than them, Face­book bought Insta­gram for a bil­lion dollars!

The method in this seem­ing mad­ness (Insta­gram only had 13 employ­ees) is that it was recently the most down­loaded photo-sharing app glob­ally (its Android app was adding 1 mil­lion users a day, its IOS app 25 mil­lion) and a lot of Facebook’s traf­fic is from photo shar­ing. Face­book also has to get bet­ter at mobile, and in buy­ing Insta­gram, they’ve acquired a piece of tech­nol­ogy and a user base to help them do that. They knocked out a threat and got some cool tech into the bar­gain. Other com­pa­nies were begin­ning to look at Insta­gram as well, despite being in the mid­dle of an IPO Face­book had to move quickly and decisively.

If we look at the lat­est data from App­Data on Face­book Apps, this also gives us an idea of a shift occur­ring from social net­works to social shar­ing amongst app users in a social net­work envi­ron­ment. Espe­cially in images and video.

In this recent report, Social­Cam, Viddy and Chill, two video shar­ing plat­forms and an app that gen­er­ates ran­dom noise. No games!

Social­Cam is now the largest app on Face­book with over 42M monthly aver­age users. Chill went from noth­ing to over 7M MAU in a week!

Trend: Mobile Video Will Gen­er­ate Over 70 Per­cent of Mobile Data Traf­fic by 2016 (Source: Cisco VNI Mobile Research)

And if we look again at the Cisco VNI Mobile 2012 data, we can see that it is pre­dicted that by 2016, 70% of web traf­fic will be mobile video. This, com­bined with the growth of video shar­ing apps means that if Face­book doesn’t adapt and embrace mobile then their rev­enue growth will stall even quicker than it is cur­rently doing.

This appar­ent move away from gam­ing is backed up by lat­est data on Zynga. Their acqui­si­tion of Draw­Some­thing (OMGPOP) in March for $200M instantly bought them around 12M (source App­Data) users. But since then, life has not been so pretty. Daily aver­age users of Zynga games are now back to pre-DrawSomething lev­els only two months later. Is this the start of a ter­mi­nal decline or just a blip? The halv­ing of its share price would seem to indi­cate a long term problem.

(Source: Busi­ness Insider)

Part of Zynga’s trou­bles can be traced back to changes made by Face­book (there’s a sur­prise), lim­it­ing the viral chan­nels the games mak­ers use to invade your news­feed with updates and requests. Though, going back to my ear­lier com­ments on intru­sive­ness, this is prob­a­bly no bad thing as far as users were con­cerned. But, these changes forced com­pa­nies such as Zynga to look at cre­at­ing their own plat­forms, try­ing to divorce them­selves from Face­book. So iron­i­cally, the very intru­sive­ness of the gam­ing plat­forms ini­tial growth that was wel­comed as inno­v­a­tive at the time, ended up back-firing on them as Face­book sought to counter crit­i­cism by chang­ing the rules.

Going back to my com­ments on Insta­gram, inter­est­ingly Zynga’s biggest area of growth is mobile. Games such as Draw­Some­thing and WFF have a vast amount of mobile users. Is this the way for­ward for them? Face­book Cam­era app has just launched; funny, looks just like Insta­gram but not as good. Per­haps a bil­lion dol­lars was not such a bad price after all. Could Insta­gram become Facebook’s You Tube?

Rumours are also gath­er­ing apace that Face­book will launch a smart­phone this year. Now that Google’s pur­chase of Motorola has gone through, is this yet another defen­sive move?

Recent data from the US would seem to indi­cate that whilst mobile adver­tis­ing (and let’s face it, adver­tis­ing dol­lars are what they are all after) is a huge growth area, it might be a lit­tle bit mis­lead­ing, as it might never catch up to time spent on mobile devices.

(Source: Busi­ness Insider)

Then there is also the whole native app ver­sus HTML5 debate. At the moment, ad spend through Nex­age (one of the lead­ing mobile ad exchanges) would seem to show an even split with both hav­ing their mer­its and weak­nesses. There is no right or wrong answer as to what will win, remem­ber Beta­Max vs VHS, the bet­ter tech­ni­cal prod­uct lost in the face of mar­ket­ing and content.

So where does this all leave us?

There are inter­est­ing times ahead. Will Face­book become the new MySpace and become old and uncool? Will Pin­ter­est get round its major copy­right issues? Will Tum­blr ever actu­ally make sense? Will Google ever admit that Google+ is a mon­u­men­tal fail­ure? Or are we all actu­ally liv­ing in a new world cre­ated using Unreal Engine 4?

Only time will tell.

Related posts:

1. B2B social media plan — I want one
2. How Salesforce.com do social
3. High­lights from our Mobile Huddle
4. B2B social media mar­ket­ing map
5. A very social huddle