Having followed up on the heels of the MySpace craze of the mid-2000s and having gained its initial usership through colleges before opening beyond college campuses in the late 2000s, in early 2020 Facebook is still the first name that comes to mind for social media. It was dominant for a decade but has seen drops in usership as functionality changed to include biased curating of news stream information and advertisements, as scandals erupted involving users’ data security and social engineering, and as the novelty of online social interconnection and reconnection gave way to social overreach and intrusion, and to the dominance of baby and food pictures on the site.
Facebook has also been the poster child of Internet Recentralization from that same roughly 2009-2019, and only recently has this been recognized. (See Media Blitz Publicity’s article from several years back on Media Decentralization…) As such, having a presence on Facebook usually makes sense and can lead to profitable connections despite the platform’s continuing and projected decline.
Facebook ramped up its native video features during the second half of the 2010s, and though it now has many similar features to those on YouTube, comparing the two is like comparing apples and oranges because the user behavior, context, and preferred formats are different. View counts have also been reported very differently, with both platforms using different kinds of autoplay features that skew and arguably misrepresent the numbers. Facebook Watch is their attempt at a YouTube/TV-style video experience, but it hasn’t really taken off as of early 2020. Watch Parties are a way for video publishers or audiences to discuss a video as an event in itself.
Facebook bought, integrated, developed, and spun off a segment of its target audience and efforts to Instagram, which has taken off as a mobile-focused and image/video/gif-focused platform, and many in the younger generations have especially taken to Instagram while leaving Facebook behind. There are options for managing Facebook and Instagram together – particularly through the Facebook Business Manager and Creator Studio, but these require linking your accounts – and this can be quite tedious with all of the security hoops. At Media Blitz Publicity we can help you with this.
Alt-Tech Alternative: Minds.com