No no, read that again – it says running not ruining. Later this year, Facebook is heavily rumoured to be launching a webmail service that will compete with the likes of Hotmail and Gmail. Codenamed Project Titan, the service will essentially give all Facebook users an @facebook.com email address. Webmail would be another significant string to Facebook’s bow – the latest in a long line that will help it move further away from a timewaster’s paradise and into a vital communications platform. It is this ever expanding range of functionality that should cause us to consider the extent to which Facebook will dominate its users’ share of time online and as a result, it’s increasing importance to brands and advertisers too.
Now, you might very well still be wondering what the big deal with the launch of webmail would be – email has been around for decades, right? Well consider the fact that if Facebook makes this move, it will instantly become the world’s largest webmail provider with 400 million potential users. But its dominance won’t stop there, oh no. Over the past six years Facebook has already begun to become central to a huge amount of the activity some of its users carry out on the web. For these people, Facebook could be designated a ‘social crutch’ in similar vein to mobile phones – go without it for a day and you end up frothing at the mouth given the prospect of checking those notifications. Even an average user now spends 55 minutes per day using the service.
Think for a moment about your own reliance on Facebook: it used to be that Flickr was the obvious destination for photo publishing but thanks largely to the friend-tagging feature, Facebook has leapt ahead of the competition with some three billion photos uploaded every month. MSN Live Messenger, the daddy of IM, seems like a lot of hassle when compared to Facebook chat in which your entire contact list is already right there and there are no additional programs to install. Want to organise an event with your friends? Why spend vast amounts of time coordinating via emails, SMSs or phone calls when Facebook Events are so incredibly easily to maintain? Or if you fancy sharing what you’re currently up to with your mates, Facebook has ‘borrowed’ the best bits of Twitter and FriendFeed’s functionality and incorporated it into their status updates – where did you think ‘@replies’ and ‘likes’ came from?. We could go on…
Now before we get too carried away there are chinks in Facebook’s armour. In the field of video uploading for example, YouTube still very much wears the crown. But then again, what’s the first thing you do once you’ve uploaded a new clip? You post it to Facebook of course. And then there’s e-commerce. Or there would have been until recently when easyJet announced that it’s to use its Facebook page to sell flights. And that’s not even counting the vast number of microtransactions people make in games such as Farmville, which, incidentally, has more users than Twitter.
Facebook’s real masterstroke though has to be Facebook Connect, an ingenious way of granting external sites access to Facebook users’ account details. More than 60 million Facebook users are now engaging with Facebook Connect on over 80,000 external websites every month. Connect your account to Digg.com for example and as well as logging in to the latter with your Facebook details (say goodbye to sprawling lists of passwords), every time you ‘digg’ a piece of content it can automatically be published to your Facebook newsfeed. Advertisers haven’t been slow to pick up on its potential either with fantastic campaigns such as Orange’s Friend-O-Meter earlier in the year.
The real reason for highlighting all of the above though is that Facebook’s increasing dominance of the web has huge implications for not only consumers but brands and advertisers alike. The more functionality Facebook offers, the more reliant its users will become on the service and the more time they’ll spend interacting with it. This in turn will only serve to increase Facebook’s huge lead over the competition further. The fact that MySpace is hemorrhaging users and Bebo is seemingly about to get the axe is no coincidence. All of this is of course extremely good news for advertisers who can now be confident that they have found a platform full of extremely engaged users on which to house their campaigns. Who needs a wide-reaching media plan these days?
Mark Zuckerberg spoke last year about the fact that he didn’t view the future of Facebook as a destination website, but as a web-wide platform that connects us, not just to our friends, but also the businesses and brands we transact with. Since the beginning of this year I’ve observed with great interest the number of brands who are claiming that they are shifting their campaigns to social media. Why go to the trouble of designing a full campaign site and working to direct an audience towards it when the tools on Facebook make it extremely easy to identify exactly the type of consumer you want to hop on over to your brand’s page? As the old advertising thought goes: if you knew your target audience spent every night hanging out at a certain street corner, wouldn’t you erect a giant billboard right there? Now granted, it may be more difficult to express a brand’s identity within the confines of Facebook’s branded page, but the fact that you’re not asking consumers to journey over to a brand’s own site outweighs this concern to some degree.
Facebook’s popularity with advertisers isn’t accidental. A series of intelligent targeting options and formats have certainly had something to do with it. A few years ago, accurately targeting ads based on demographic and psychographic information was challenging to say the least. Facebook’s advertising system means anybody with a few quid and a postage stamp sized piece of creative can promote corned beef to 32 year old men living in Scunthorpe with an interest in fly fishing. And while the ads themselves may be measly in size, it’s the ‘social actions’ attached to them that are important. Rather than merely being exposed to a regular display ad, you’ll get newsfeed messages informing you that your friends have interacted with branded content and encouraging you to do the same – to the user, it seems more like a recommendation from a friend than a brand selling something. As we know all too well, consumers’ trust in their peers far outweighs trust in advertisers. It is the appeal of these unique features that has seen Facebook’s ad revenue grow to the extent that it is reportedly even challenging Google for direct response ad spend.
Of course it’s not just the ads that are important for brands. The opportunity to set up and maintain a branded page that grants you direct access to thousands of fans is hugely important and has many implications. Brands are no longer talking or selling to consumers, they’re engaging in conversations with them. As such they have to define and adopt a suitable tone of voice, carefully choose the content that will be of interest, ensure they respond to queries promptly, deal with trolls and spammers, find a resource to keep the whole thing ticking over and all the while measure the impact on ROI. Put simply: brands have never before had to think about such a range of variables for a single platform.
Facebook’s grip on consumers is now so wide-reaching and strong that it seems to have become something of an unstoppable juggernaut. Assuming it continues along a similar path to success in the next few years, what percentage of your campaigns will you run on it rather than a traditional brand site? And perhaps more worryingly, what percentage of your personal time on the net will you be devoting to it? It seems fairly safe to say that Facebook is not only here to stay, it’s planning on having a hand in the way you communicate for the rest of your life.
Alex Horner
Planner, EHS 4D Digital