Is Facebook Still a Valuable Service Tool for Business? [INFOGRAPHIC]
Paul Schulze has a fascinating post and infographic up on the Fanpage Karma blog analyzing whether or not Facebook is still a useful tool for businesses, titled, alarmingly, "Attention! Facebook is losing its footing – user posts decreasing." The only thing is, according to the Fanpage Karma blog's analysis, Schulze's alarm might be perfectly justified.
Schulze's thesis is that, due to several factors, Facebook is becoming less and less valuable for businesses. After analyzing more than 1,000 business pages across many different industries, some very telling patterns emerged. Said Schulze, "while the average page had around 2.26 million fans in April 2014, it shrunk to 2.04 million in May 2015. This has to do with Facebook getting rid of fake users, which made pages like Starbucks lose over a million users."
So some of the loss of fans isn't on Facebook exactly, but a bigger problem is that there are just fewer posts, on both the business and the user side. People and businesses are communicating and interacting less and less. Part of this is almost certainly increased competition from newer social networks like Snapchat, which is eating away at not only Facebook's userbase, but more importantly the attention of both younger users and business that want to capture that highly prized demographic.
Another problem is that when businesses are interacting with their customers they aren't doing it very well. According to Schulze, "over the last 12 months [fewer and fewer] users had their questions answered. A whopping 12% less users got a response [when they ask questions on a business page]." And while people are getting their questions answered faster, taking 17 hours when it used to take 31, it's still a ridiculous amount to time to wait. This is especially ugly considering that "most questions are rather simple."
Basically, Facebook is so widespread and ubiquitous now that it is now having a lot of trouble getting new users. Hence why they are attempting to get the internet to people and areas without it, in the hopes of garnering even more users. But even then, as the platform (and its users) age, it is going to have more and more trouble keeping businesses focused and happy.
Which leads to this infographic. I don't know the answer to the titular question, but Facebook should probably put some effort into making sure it is "no."
by Aaron Miles
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