Monday, June 4, 2012

Photo/Video sharing kills Facebook & grows Twitter



In one of my posts in last October titled  "Facebook "Share" button is going to be the next big thing" I explained how Facebook strategically gave more prominence to Photo&video shares through the timeline view. In a recent post titled "Is engagement higher for Facebook photos?" i proved with stats how this has made sharing of a photo or a video get higher engagement than a text update.

Outcome of this strategy was heavy sharing of images which resulted in the emergence of photo sharing Facebook pages such as "Trust me,Im an Engineer", "Ads of the world", "Kajuwaththa eksath"(Local) , "Loweth ne" (Local) and the culture of edited photo sharing in the form of memes.

This has also made the data consumption higher for Facebook usage and the requirement of certain minimum speeds to access Facebook (Some android phones will need long Facebook app load times). But the most important and a vital result of highlighting photos is the negligence to text based updates.  As given in the post "Is engagement higher for Facebook photos?", Facebook users are three times less likely to respond to a text only update now.

We have passed the era of text status updates of good and bad moments of life and getting dozens of comments from Friends and Family. Now a text status update in Facebook receives very low attention. This outcome is killing Facebook by driving users to microblogging platforms like Twitter where even a text based update can make a lot of impact. Do you think this can kill Facebook? Will Facebook understand the consequences and try to rectify it? Please feel free to comment your opinion below...

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