No Facebook?

On March 13, 2019, Facebook went down for over eight hours. Believe it or not, the world carried on. E-commerce didn’t crash and human social interaction continued. Facebook itself, however, could lose over 80 million dollars in lost revenue.

Facebook entered the scene in 2004. Since that time it has grown to be a company worth upwards of $500 billion with approximately 2.3 billion users worldwide. Along the way, it has either defeated or bought out rivals. Even the mighty Google is packing in its social media platform Google+. Even though Facebook has dominated the social media market something has to come along that’s better? Right? How long can one company continue to dominate the market?

Losing interest?

Interest in Facebook may be waning. Nearly 3 million users were loss in 2018, many using SnapChat, YouTube, or Instagram (Which is owned by FB). This is due in part to privacy issues that have been uncovered over the past several years. Early users of the platform were young adults. Facebook weathered a loss of users several years ago when “parents” starting using Facebook for personal reasons and to keep tabs on their kids. But over the years users returned or were replaced by new, younger users.

Tech investor Jason Calacanis launched a contest in 2018 called the Openbook Challenge. Calacanis is offering teams $100,000 to build a billion-user social network that would replace Facebook. You can get updates on the project here Open Book Challenge 

Will companies find another way?

Once Facebook exploded businesses realized they had to get in on the social media game. There are 80 million small and medium business pages on Facebook in addition to large corporations. Companies use Facebook like individual users, keeping followers up to date on the latest happenings. Once Facebook allowed advertising businesses could reach an even larger audience. When Facebook experiences outages, in addition to user dissatisfaction, it also causes revenue loss. Continued privacy issues and major outages will likely push personal and business users elsewhere.

Google and the other search engines offer myriad ways to highlight and advertise your business. If not taking advantage of these options now, companies would certainly gravitate in that direction. Whatever eventually does replace Facebook probably would allow advertising and business pages. Unless that replacement is truly a social media platform that disallows corporate infringement.

When Facebook does tank the world will continue. We’ve made it through when companies and media outlets that have been providing services for over a hundred years have packed it in. We’ll get through without Facebook.

The statistics used were found through general Internet searches and featured in the blog post 41 Facebook Stats That Matter to Marketers in 2019.

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