LOS ANGELES (KNX) — When it comes to social media selection, is Facebook still your number one? If you thought “no,” you’re not the only one. The social media network lost half a million users at the end of 2021, it’s first time in 18 years, according to Forbes.
Does this mean the once king of social is finally past its peak? Karen North, a digital and social media expert joined KNX In Depth to answer that question.
“Facebook as a social media platform is sort of a nightclub that used to have the cool kids and now sort of has the cool kids’ parents and grandparents,” North said.
However, the founder and former director of USC Annenberg’s Digital Social Media program, also commended that its parent-company Meta, is “like the Madonna or Justin Beiber,” always able to reinvent in ways that draw people in again.
That being said, the social platform has suffered a “perfect storm” of problems. Not just with its disappointing quarterly financials at the end of 2021, but with more people moving from social to the real world again as pandemic restrictions lessen, North said.
Then the big one, Apple empowering iPhone users to stop apps from tracking their habits.
“That’s become a critical problem for [Facebook] in terms of their ability to collect data and then use it — either for ads, or for just curating an experience for us,” North continued. “So I think that they’re having more and more trouble in general.
There’s one thing though that most other social apps don’t have or do for us though, which gives Facebook a leg to keep standing on.
“What they've done so successfully is that they've become our global address book. We can find people we’ve drifted away from, people we used to know, and they’ve become our photo album,” North said.
“So from us, to our parents, to our grandparents…they host our photos and allow us to tag and connect and share so that we have shared experiences archived on their platform.”
When asked about Meta’s disappointing quarterly reports and the surprising drop in Facebook users, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said stiff competition from rivals TikTok and YouTube are among the causes, Forbes reported.
“TikTok is so big a competitor already and also continues to grow at quite a fast rate,” Zuckerberg told the outlet.
However, even with Meta’s acquisition of Instagram, which features “reels” that directly compete with TikTok’s short-from videos, North said the company may still falter with monetary gains going forward. Why?
“It’s very hard to get revenue generated from reels because, if you’re watching a very brief five second or 10 second video, where do you put the ads?” North said.
“In terms of their quarterly financial disclosures, they can’t show a lot of profit from it, or the kind of profit that people would like because they’re handicapped on their ability to make money on it.”