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Is Facebook relevant?
Numbers aren’t everything, but they can tell a story better than anecdotal evidence. There are two ways to look at it: Facebook the company, and Facebook the platform.
Let’s start with the platform and work our way out.
As of 2021, Facebook is the largest social network at 2.89 billion users. It’s also the 7th most visited website on the entire global internet.
There are 7.674 billion people on the planet, and about five percent of Facebook accounts are fake. Add in the people with business and personal accounts, and roughly a third of the human population is on Facebook.
About a third of those people are children under the age of 18 (Facebook minimum age is 13, but let’s just assume no kid wants to be there for the sake of easier math), and that means basically every other adult is on Facebook.https://www.statista.com/statistics/376128/facebook-global-user-age-distribution/
The age distribution shows it’s mostly 18–35 year olds on Facebook. In marketing, that’s a great demographic – it’s the millennials and the older end of Gen Z. But is Facebook relevant?
And when you look at the social platforms against each other, you can see if Facebook relency is applicable.
Four of the top five most popular social platforms are Facebook-owned. This is a large part of why the government is seeking antitrust action against Facebook as a company.
The bulk of revenue from Facebook comes from advertising. Its only real competition comes from Google and Amazon, both of which are active in social media too.
As large as it is, Facebook as a platform is nothing like what it used to look like. The app always served third-party development (something platforms like Twitter and Clubhouse really failed at) and integrated itself into a lot of other sites.
Is Facebook relevant?
Even if you don’t use your Facebook account, you still use it to login to comment on a lot of media platforms. It’s used as an identification platform for media sites to trace comments for spam. This is what it does in exchange for media outlets assisting in fact checking news spread on the platform.
As a platform, Facebook is in a position that America Online, Google, and Microsoft all were at one point in time around the turn of the millennium.
It’s trying to be a portal for everything you do online, and it’s incentivizing creators to continue building content with the launch of Creator Tools across Instagram, Whatsapp, Facebook, and Messenger.
It outlasted Microsoft’s Mixer and is competing effectively against Google’s YouTube, Amazon’s Twitch, and newcomers like Tiktok in gaming, live-streaming, and video content.
The company is really good about staying on the front line of innovation. Getting your business listed on Facebook is arguably more important than getting yourself listed there.
Major brands spend a lot of money to market on Facebook because it provides proven results. A lot of other platforms like Twitter struggle to monetize and provide a real sustainable ROI for businesses on a mass scale.
The biggest use cases for both are marketing and customer service. Big companies have AI providing the same service on Facebook and Twitter that they provide in person, email, etc.
Facebook is now trying to pull people into its metaverse with Horizon on Oculus VR.https://typo.today/is-the-metaverse-the-future-of-social-media/
Oculus, like commenting on media sites, requires you to sign in with Facebook. And to be perfectly real, Oculus’s VR platform is pretty cool. I have PSVR and used HTC Vive, but Oculus is my main VR at this point for convenience.
Even if I never log in to Facebook the site again, I will still use Oculus VR, giving it an effective way to reach me anyway. And I haven’t met a kid who didn’t love VR too after trying it.
We may not use Facebook in 10 years the same way we do now, but we’ll use it somehow.
There are around 2 million Facebook portal devices out there somewhere. There are something like 10 million Oculus headsets sold. Maybe it’ll be a device company like Snapchat is trying to be.
Maybe it’ll be another broadcaster that we recognize more through Instagram. Maybe it’ll get broken up like Standard Oil and each individual company will thrive for generations.
But I don’t see Facebook losing relevancy anytime soon. There’s still plenty of activity happening in groups, pages, and profiles. It’s integrated into media and politics. At this point, I’d consider it too big to fail.