Facebook: From Experience to Company's Future
It wasn't long ago, after setting up the Facebook (FB) account for posting parts of my articles from my own blog, it survived for just a couple of days. Out of the blue, my account get disabled by FB without a reason. It has been a waste of time after working on my FB page for days. For such a level of service, I won't do FB anymore. I probably will turn to other media in future instead, but definitely do FB no more.
The reason is that I don't want to waste my time to work on a platform that is unstable, oversensitive (in fact hypersensitive), "fragile", not robust and will risk myself from being disabled and get blocked in any second without any warning and for no reason. For they, at very least, should:
(i) give a reason for their action,
(ii) give an opportunity for the affected user to defend, and
(iii) allow time for this transition,
despite they reserve their full right for it. This is a fatal error for a B2C business to work in the way to drive 'normal' customers away. On one hand of course they should protect their platform from being abused by many around the globe for illegal or immoral purposes, but on the other they should review this 'blocking' strategy taking into account of their AI's accuracy of the so-called 'detected "abuse"'. Perhaps they will find out that their robot AI isn't working so well, and that it has been too sensitive to detect things wrongly. In the end, the one who is "abusing" probably not the customer.
If their AI robot is clever enough, they should have set up a staggered system like "action taken in accordance with detected level of abuse", for which it is able to divide the detected abuse by different level/category/area. For instance, for the most severe case, their action should be: block the site
at once without hesitation; but for the case of "suspicious violation" cases, they
should give out a warning with grounds for their suspect, ask for defence and give them transition time; for the "may-be" cases, they should warn the users. They haven't adopted the staggered system, it is either because of the ignorance of the management or the foolishness of the AI robot.
To be fair, under the political and regulatory pressure, FB would have to take a balance for it, but user's bad experience can be contagious. On top of that, in July 2019, FB was fined US$5 billion for privacy violation. It seems as though FB has perverted the founders' primitive idea of providing a free social media for people to communicate freely, but now an additional screening eye has been applied to watch people. This stupid act greatly hurts the brand and it can be irrevocable.
 |
| Photo by Thomas Ulrich from Pixabay |
Well, it is actually no big deal for me personally, what I lost was just a little time and I am still happy with my life. I've almost forgotten about it. However this experience vividly shows me with an evidence that FB's business has reached a plateau, because:
(a) people will get sick with their service like ignoring customers' needs/rights, and violating customers' privacy. Though it is a free platform, this is a customer-based business, users number is their asset which they should take care of. As more and more people are having similar experience as I do, they would turn their back on it. Even it is still a market leader now, it will soon become a crap when no one wants to use it (such as me), no one advertises on it.
(b) No company is competition free, especially for this hot business. In figure below, as of July this year, FB owns
around 48% of the worldwide social media's market share, and it has been flattening
off in recent years. If FB can't expand their market in the future (with such a
customer service, it's hard for them), the market share FB owns today will pass
to the other competitors that are growing up and more competitive. For photo-sharing ability, Pinterest is coming up. For chatting service, WeChat, Tweeter and Snapchat. For video sharing, Youtube and Tiktok. If FB can't expand their user's number in the existing markets, they should consider either increasing their permeation to new markets or developing new products for the existing 'usual' markets. FB was banned to get in the biggest market, China, i.e. FB's user number has reached a max (though a recent spike due to Covid-19 pandemic). Apart from FB messenger, Whatsapp, Instagram, no other products we can see out there in the market. [PS: Whatsapp and Instagram are not their developed products but acquired through M&A (merge and acquisition)].
(c) Users are not loyal, and they don't have to, they are always asking for new things for new experience. The platform they used to play around does not convince them to stay all long. They will seek other new things to try out on market, this is especially true to youngsters. If they cannot run the race of keep launching new products, they will soon lose their customers.
(d) Controversial policy they are undertaking, such as receiving advertisements from politicians or politic purposes. Unlike Tweeter, FB still accepts politic advertisements. FB also faces different political challenges recently, such as (i) the potential antitrust lawsuit by Federal Trade Commission, (ii) the new regulation proposed by Australian Government to stop FB and GOOGL sharing news on their platforms for free otherwise payments for the media organisations are needed.
Many obstacles and challenges FB has to overcome before it can grow any further.
Announced by Mark Zuckerberg this year, the five focus of FB in the next decade are as follows (Goodwin, 2020):
- Generational change
- A new private social network
- Decentralization of opportunity
- The next computing platform
- New forms of governance
Recently FB collaborates with Visa to develop an electronic pay business in Brazil. However, I don't think FB can beat the world's leading giant companies which have already been in the booming mobile e-payment market, including Apple (Apple Pay), Alibaba (Ali Pay), Google (Google Pay), Samsung (Samsung Pay), Tencent (WeChat Pay), Paypal. For this reason, the stock of FB will not be skyrocketing in the years to come. Well, likely so. Worse, it will only accelerate their fall if they continue to treat their customers this way and ignore competitors' threats in the market. Just think about how brilliant Yahoo used to be? And how it is now?
To sum up, FB to me has been a developed business, reaching its bottleneck with no further developments in this saturated market. For no new market or
no real new products, the future of the company should turn to develop
some new businesses with some new concrete directions and markets for
diversification, sticking to the old ones with such a level of service will eventually lead to a falling phase. FB has to show up their
ambition to explore new directions to grow and at the
same time keep its existing businesses' profits by keeping their users
happy. Can they do that now? Judge by your own wisdom.
Below data finds from the customer-based social media, the number is 'active users' worldwide (as of July 2020) (Statista, 2020):
Facebook: 2,603 million
Youtube: 2,000 million (Owned by Google)
Whatsapp: 2,000 million (Owned by FB)
FB messenger: 1,300 million (Owned by FB)
WeChat: 1,203 million (Owned by Tencent)
Instagram: 1,082 million (Owned by FB)
Tiktok: 800 million (ByteDance)
QQ: 694 million
Sina Weibo: 550 million
QZone: 517 million
Reddit: 430 million
Kuaishou: 400 million
Snapchat: 397 million
Pinterest: 367 million
Tweeter: 326 million
(source: Statista: https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/)
中文譯本請查閱：
References
Statista, Most popular social networks worldwide as of July 2020, ranked by number of active users (in millions), available from: https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/
Motley Fool Staff, 為甚麼我放售Facebook股票, available from: https://hk.finance.yahoo.com/news/%E7%82%BA%E7%94%9A%E9%BA%BC%E6%88%91%E6%94%BE%E5%94%AEfacebook%E8%82%A1%E7%A5%A8-090537343.html
Jamin Goodwin, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg ditches annual challenges for a look at 2020 and beyond, USA Today, available from: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/2020/01/09/facebooks-mark-zuckerberg-drops-annual-challenges-five-2030-goals/4424484002/
====================
Disclaimer
This webpage is a personal blog. All comments are purely personal opinions and experience sharing. All comments made by myself or anyone does not constitute any offer, solicitation, invitation, inducement, suggestion or recommendation for any investment or purchase. Investment involves risks. Readers should consider whether the investment is suitable for your individual situation. Readers are requested to use personal independent thinking, verification, and analysis. All investment decisions made by readers and the gains or losses caused by the investment are not related to me.
I cannot guarantee the authenticity and completeness of the relevant content, including but not limited to any errors, errors, omissions, or infringing, defamatory or false information or any other information that may cause offense or otherwise cause any recourse or I will not bear any legal responsibility for any loss or damage caused by the information or omission of the complaint.
Copyright Notice
All materials and texts in this blog belong to my exclusive property, and are protected by intellectual property laws and rights (including but not limited to laws protecting copyright). According to this law and right, any unauthorized use of information is a tort. Without my explicit consent, all or part of the information and text of this blog may not be used, copied, adapted, modified, published, stored or otherwise reproduced, distributed, published or made available, sold, or transmitted to the public Use these copyrighted works for any purpose.
(c) 2020 高山雪. All rights reserved.
留言
發佈留言