Facebook’s challenges

In the next year–two years maximum–Facebook will face new challenges. My voice may be a rather quixotic one, with their march towards a billion users, half way there already, and it may not be the behemoth it is today.

Here are three challenges as I see it:

  1. History.
    Being the biggest of anything makes one a target-whether by competition or anti-trust regulators. It is fun to be king of the hill for a while, but with grand size comes bureaucracy, more layers of management, a slower ability to act quickly, and monopolistic tendencies. Scrutiny increases, lawyers get their antennae up,and it makes that number one position much much harder to maintain. Always has. Witness what happened to AT&T, decades ago, and watch what is now taking place with Google, from China to France to Italy, which could happen to Facebook, which leads me to the second point.
  2. Privacy and advertisers.
    I know Facebook has said they will never ever infringe on their subscriber’s privacy, but they have changed the terms and conditions of what is private, from a small disclaimer a few years ago to 7 pages, 5.666 words, by my WordCount. http://www.facebook.com/policy.php.

    If Facebook users really do get the impression—rightly or wrongly—that their details will be sold to advertisers, they’ll move—and quickly. Regardless of what the folksy legalese says. That is a challenge. That, along with the new issues of cyberwar. Is it possible that people may get jittery about having their details on line? One day, someone will announce war on Facebook, and I hope it is a small one. Again, the bigger one is, the bigger the challenges, which I hope they know..

  3. Fatigue.
    All the talk on social media overlooks the fatigue people increasingly have, and is different for various age groups.

    • Boomers. They are taking over Facebook, and let’s toss in the elderly as well. They do not use it the way their children or young adults do, but rather for social chit chat, as they try to find meaningful and topical things to say, which the young are less concerned about. Hence, the older group may get weary of reading comments from their Friends on things of marginal interest, and decide to go elsewhere-somewhere quieter and with a smaller group. Facebook groups and subgroups may thus expand, as well as the ubiquitous corporate pages, rather than the purely social side.
    • Teens and Millennials. They use it more than email, but this is the most fickle consumer crowd known to marketers, the hardest to consistently please. They may get tired of the same old tools and groups Facebook offers, and look for something that does NOT have their parents or grandparents on it. Every young generation wants their own space and own toys–that is their privilege. And out there right now is someone who wants to eat Facebook’s lunch. The young crowd will always look forother countercultual options once Facebook becomes “cultural”.

I don’t know who or what those options will look like, I’m far from being that smart or farsighted. And no doubt Facebook is pondering over these issues as well, but will be curious to see how things shake out in the next two years, and where their competition is—I’ll wager India and China. We shall see.