How social networks face "user Exodus"

In pursuit of "innovation" and "trend" and other factors, in the view of many industry experts, Twitter, Facebook and other relatively updated network products in the industry has always been more "cool", compared to AOL, Yahoo and other former giants are already yesterday yellow, vulnerable.

But today, as a content provider of news information, AOL, Yahoo-led portal site still occupies a considerable market share in the United States, although the growth rate has not been compared with the generations of Silicon Valley, but its access to traffic and user holdings is surprisingly stable, rare ups and downs of the trend, As if from the outside, no longer have a burst, and stability is more than sufficient. Instead, Facebook, the world's biggest social networking site, is experiencing a "big cancellation" of users, facing a loss of users and less activity.

(the "Big Cancel" campaign: Facebook is launching an activity that encourages people to reduce their number of friends and reduce the length of their Facebook use.) The initiators argue that Facebook offers too much information, and that it does not help users to comb the information well. )

This is the difference between UGC (user contribution content) and PGC (professional production content), the former information capacity is greater, and support users to comb the flow through custom form, at the same time, the requirements of the site operation is very high, the so-called "user experience" design to inject considerable kung fu and study, A careful will lead to controversy and sanctions; the stability of the latter is that the supply and demand relationship between the website and the user is very simple, although may not be suitable for each user to provide a "dedicated daily", but based on content productivity and per capita reading volume of the balanced relationship, the overall will not appear too big "ourselves".

A Yahoo executive once said: "Yahoo may no longer be the investment in the eyes of the gold, but for Yahoo itself, the development of the Internet is nothing more than the user to Yahoo news headlines from ' Share to MySpace ' into ' share to Facebook ' and ' share to Twitter '. ”

That sounds slick, but it's basically true.

Since the IPO in 2012, Facebook has been unable to remain isolated from the geek stance because of the return on equity investment, and it needs to confront the voices of the public. As early as the end of 2012, the US investment bank Evercore in a market research report, highlighting Facebook's "slowing trend in US traffic and the loss of young people has created a worrying problem." "In February this year, Pew Research Center, a polling agency in Washington, conducted a survey of Facebook users, which showed that 27% of users chose to reduce their time to visit Facebook this year. Finally, Facebook itself admits that its young users are "actively using other similar products and services that can replace Facebook." In this case, we may encounter a decline in user activity, business damage situation. ”

This massive defection of a website or a company, if it happens in China, would be a press conference to complain of Blood and tears, "this is a competitor's smear." But instead of scolding Twitter or Pinterest for "competing against Facebook for the joint media", Facebook is really looking at whether it has actually pushed users to the brink. Facebook found that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which has a good relationship with it (the highest proportion of Facebook engineers graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), has done a study in the journal Marvell Review, the "Autopsy Social network", Friendster (founded in 2002), a social networking site that was once as popular as Facebook and eventually died, analyzes the reasons for its "The Daw" and how to avoid it.

"Marvell Review" believes that the cause of Friendster's death is that it does not contain the starting point for the collapse of the buddy relationship: by digging the topology between Friendster users, Marvell Review The discovery of the separation of friends in the user's biosphere will produce fusion reaction, more and more friends left will cause the center of users also began to shake and appear following psychology. The way to resist this loss is to drive as many users as possible to increase the number of his friends, if a user has only one friend, then with the friend's departure, his chain of interaction with the break, it is easy to go with it, but if the user has 10 friends, then a friend's departure, it will not be so impact, The user's interactive chain still has value, which gives it the raw power to reside. At the same time, the existence of a suitable substitute, is also an important reference for the user to transfer decision-making, when the Friendster began to lose users, just in Facebook's vigorous promotion period, This high substitution ultimately helped Facebook to take on most of the users who left the Friendster.

That's why Facebook is afraid of the big cancellation campaign, friend relationship is the foundation of UGC Type Web site, all content, interaction and connection are based on friends, once the user began to mass cancellation of attention, reduce their number of friends, this will lead to the information flow of the slow, and affect the stay time. (The PGC site, by contrast, has no such concern.) Burger King, a fast-food brand, once launched a marketing campaign on Facebook: Delete 10 friends and get a free burger. The "Snitches snitches" stunt quickly sparked discussions and involvement by many users, while Facebook was nervous about blocking the app, saying that "This smart application is safe" and is rooted in the fear of helping users reduce their number of friends.

Mr Zuckerberg also said in 2009 that "a disruptive business is stupid to listen to users", and that it was not long before Facebook created a user opinion aggregation page before revising its layout or terms of service, to the point where Facebook has become a giant enterprise serving 1 billion of users ( And not the Silicon Valley rookie, it's not just about being responsible for local users-it's about taking care of users around the world, where one-on-one customer-service communication is no longer a way of doing things, and the user's appeal to Facebook tends to be expressed by a group reaction, one with a foot vote. In order to cope with the "big cancellation" movement in a very small circle that would not infect more people, Facebook is also looking for a couple of defensive strategies, one to encourage users to search for more potential friends, "graph search" is the corresponding tool, It encourages users to discover new objects of interest through existing friends and conditions, such as "A Doberman's single girl on the street where I live", and a coalition of more than 18 operators from 14 different countries (mainly in Asia, Europe and South America), Users can send messages to Facebook via mobile apps, free of charge, to increase the amount of information that is not saturated with the decline in the number of friends.

As for how to deal with the problem of migrating users to alternative products, Facebook's approach is more straightforward: acquiring alternatives. Instagram was once the target of the migration of young Facebook users, and Facebook simply bought it so that young people who gave up Facebook to Instagram were still in the grip of Facebook.

This game between social networking sites and users is actually the embryonic form of democracy, attack and defense transformation brought about by the promotion of Web services and user awareness of the maturity, which also let people see some slightly sad difference. When Facebook asked a professional body to assess the user's protest behavior, costs and improvement measures, we were still talking to each other about "I'm always right!" I'm the one who criticizes me as a competitor. And while we're still in the red for "Twitter can have ads," Facebook's users have been involved in the development of official commercial products--and, with the advice of users, Facebook has reached a partnership agreement with Chirpify, the e-commerce payment platform, Facebook users can directly comment on "buy" under the information of musicians, writers, etc. to instantly complete the transaction, and Facebook is happy to extract Commission proceeds from it, and the user saves the purchase process and time.

Of course, Facebook or the entire social network, there are some problems that may not be fully solved in the short term, such as information overload. According to Google's index data, the amount of information generated on the Internet today is equivalent to the total amount of information in the year 2004. Relying too much on the buzz of social networks feeds many Internet users with information anxiety. Han also recently talked about his own microblog, the micro-letter view: "If you indulge in it, in addition to a little inspiration and in other places can see the information, you gain is full of emotion, if you want to remain objective and calm, but also in the screening of the various news of the true and false to spend too much time." You brush for a long time, think you know a lot of avenues, the second Tianquan forget, but is a long talk with friends, and family dinner, and daughter of a go out more touching. ”

But lowering the reliance on social networks, speaking simply and practicing, is not so easy. Rachel Baier, a 14-year-old high School student in Massachusetts, found herself stuck on Facebook on average 7 hours a day, feeling that she had no time to settle down to read a book without being motivated to leave Facebook, her father Paul Baier a Little help: he signed an agreement with his daughter to get a 200 dollar reward from her if she could suspend Facebook for 5 months. In order to ensure the implementation of the agreement, these 5 months, the daughter of Facebook's account password will be kept by his father, 5 months later returned.

Facebook also needs to re-examine its own, and why the "escape from Facebook" rather than "visit Facebook" has become a value orientation for users. This will also be a long period of "pain" for global social networks. And this situation, as early as in China also staged once, since 2009, with the emergence of more media-enabled microblogging products, social networks in the Chinese market began to lose control of the first batch of Web sites, once no two of the network has become a dead city, Renren relies more than "colleagues" relationship more stable "classmate" The relationship captures the chance, but still fails to stop its market capitalisation from slipping from 7 billion of dollars in the initial IPO to $1 billion today. But now Sina Weibo, the biggest user in China, is starting to feel threatened because newer, more compelling social products, such as micro-letters, are all in the "down" role of losing users when they become "user Exodus".

Clearly, the "throes" of the Chinese-American social network, while similar, do not have the same reference to each other. Like Facebook found that users in the escape after the Instagram to buy the latter way, net/Renren did not buy Sina Weibo, Sina Weibo today is also not capable of buying micro-letter. Another aspect of Facebook's worth learning is that user relationships are much more important than user activity, and business development, operational strategy, technology updates, and so on, need to take into account whether the user can gain experience, especially the "weak relationship" into "strong relationship" is particularly critical.

Realistically speaking, for example, Weibo did not insist on raising the muzzle of a centimeter of the principle, the initiative to write off some accounts to reduce the user's relationship chain node, or to indulge some of the marketing of large force of the ads to make some users endure "decisive cancellation of attention", are not clever as.