In recent weeks, Facebook has nicely presented how to appropriately react to a fast-changing social media market. Thereby, it has become one of the best examples of an agile enterprise in the last few years. Facebook extracts the best elements from every social platform, simultaneously using its greatest competitive advantage – its number of active users.
See which functions Facebook took over from its competitors in the last few weeks:
- Facebook Video starts to overtake YouTube, video materials originally uploaded on Facebook gain higher organic reach than those originally uploaded to YouTube.
Snapchat has recently surpassed Facebook with its daily video views.
- Facebook Mentions is a clear competitor to Periscope and Meerkat, which both have captured small audiences so far. Facebook Mentions, although it is a new app, has gained hundreds of thousands of viewers right away.
- By introducing Facebook Notes, Facebook overtook a function not only of LinkedIn Pulse but also other user-generated content websites like Medium.com and blogging platforms (WordPress, Blogspot, Tumblr):
Facebook “notes” have a new Medium-like appearance. (See comments on this note.) https://t.co/e8QQwWEXeN
— Dave Winer (@davewiner) August 17, 2015
- Facebook Instant Stories – an easy way for fast publishing the best content from only selected publishers. Is this a response to BuzzFeed’s success?
- Instagram Direct – Facebook owns Instagram, and it more and more starts to resemble Snapchat – Snapstagram? ?
- Facebook Messenger and WhatsUp (also owned by Facebook) – Based on the direction taken with these two apps, it is fair to suspect that Facebook will emerge with another response to Snapchat’s success.
- Instagram, on the other hand, competes effectively with other social media marketing services with mainly visual content, like Pinterest. I’d also like to remind you that observers of this market claim that Instagram will be the biggest social media platform.
All facts mentioned above, in my opinion, prove that in the upcoming year 2016, Facebook marketing will have the most distinct trend in terms of users engagement, time spent on the platform, and marketing budget allocations. Knowledge about Facebook Marketing becomes more and more necessary for every marketer!
Facebook is penetrating newer social media market segments and is subsequently overtaking them with no regrets. They are able to swallow up well-developed social media platforms, and successfully launch its own functions similar to those run by the competition.
Facebook is in a favorable position – most of its social media competitors do not have many users, and building a loyal community is the most expensive and time consuming process! If Facebook’s board of directors will keep staying alert, it can be assumed that Facebook will retain its leading position in the social media market for the next few years.
Good decisions made by the Facebook team is even more apparent when we take a look at the other social platforms; they are facing considerably slower growth, stagnation, or have a problem with converting its traffic into cash. A classic example is Google +, but lately Twitter is also facing some problems:
Despite that there’s a seemingly great variety of social media platforms, it turns out that there are only seven major players that hold them in their hands:
- Flickr, Tumblr = Yahoo
- Twitter, Vine
- LinkedIn, Slideshare
- Snapchat
- YouTube, Google+ = Google
- Facebook, Instagram, WhatsUp = Facebook
Most importantly, there is a high probability that the market will be further aggregated. For example, if Google buys out Twitter.
For now, we are waiting for a decent search engine that will allow us to search and find content on Facebook. That would be a deathblow to Google and a very important step for Facebook!
