Digithoughts

Recently eMarketer released data (Click here for full study) providing insight as to why teen users leave Facebook. Among the multitude of reasons for this is the fact that users just simply “lost interest” with the platform – accounting for 45% of teen lapses in Facebok usage. Below is an internal Digitaria thread responding to these figures, and exploring Facebook’s position in a forward moving social landscape. Be sure to leave your thoughts, we'd love to hear from you. 

Greg Zapar (originator of thread): The main reason? They just lost interest...

Deborah Sauter: We thought it was bad that our moms and grandmoms are on Facebook

We’re starting to see a lot of government agencies utilizing Facebook for ourtreach... government adoption signals the official death of Facebook as we know it..

Dan Khabie: This is great information. Still big, but clearly loosing touch. Can they be the next MySpace? Flash and Facebook dead in the same year!!!!!!

Jim McArthur: There will always be a next "MySpace." It's the nature of the Internet. As much as it seems impossible now, Google.com search will die/become irrelevant someday. Facebook as it exists today is an expiring product. 15 Years from now it won't even be remembered beyond what it is: a means to an end. A temporary stop-gap toward a much bigger eventuality: the continued transformation of society as we know it.

Warren Raisch: Funny - But so true! 

I am curious where they are going? There is no real social network other than MySpace with the critical mass, and that certainly won’t be the next step! 

Google of course would love to take the Facebook user base into its loving open arms. They recently launched Google Buzz, which can import a lot of your Facebook profile and update info.  I would not be surprised if they are working on a groundswell to get people to move so that they can monetize… I mean embrace the community:)

Daniel Huss: Google has already begun a full competitor to Facebook called Google Me...

Dexter Bustarde: YouTube. All the kids are on YouTube.

I think I'd like to see if the primary reason for leaving Facebook among other age groups is something OTHER than getting bored with it. That would be interesting.

Also, it shouldn't be so surprising that middle and high school students don't find it interesting. A big part of the appeal of a site like Facebook is the fact that it can organize people who have lots of friends. It's only natural that the main audience should gravitate older. 

It's not till college and later that people are able to accumulate hundreds of friends. When you're in middle and high school and the number of friends is still a few dozen, they all live within 10 miles of you, and you see every single one of them every single day, you don't need enterprise software to keep in touch.

Sebastian Roberts: Converting eyeballs to dollar signs tends to move many companies in this direction. Adapting a "free" model to a revenue model can be disastrous to innovation, at least in terms of the consumer. The lesson here is to maintain a higher proportion of innovation on the core product/consumer relationship and extend the growth phase of the product lifecycle.

I think we're also seeing the effects of diminishing returns from the advertising based revenue model, since consumers are growing less tolerant. The ad model is not a cut and paste solution anymore. Brands will have to take care not to kill the goose!

Chris Book Director of Marketing

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