When you head up one of the world’s largest tech companies, your plans inevitably become the news.
Such is the case with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who recently announced his goal for 2018 is to fix the problems that have plagued the company. The past couple of years have not been kind the Facebook. The social media platform was embroiled in controversies surrounding foreign influences using Facebook in an attempt to influence the 2016 election, questions about how its algorithms dictate what its users view on their news feeds and concerns about how Facebook affects its users brains.
Zuckerberg, who Forbes claims has a net worth of more than $70 billion, has publicly set a yearly goal for himself for several years. Many of these goals sound personal on the surface, and in the beginning they were, but a keen eye looking at those goals can see where the company’s future plans and concerns lay.
Zuckerberg learned Mandarin, built a simple artificial intelligence for his house and last year completed a goal to meet with and listen to people living in all 50 states.
Learning Mandarin undoubtedly aligns with Facebook’s desire to expand into China, which banned the social network in 2009 and has yet to re-open its 1.3 billion citizens to Facebook. The artificial intelligence goal came at a time when Google, Apple and Amazon were hyping the development their personal assistants and Zuckerberg’s desire to meet with people came after a year of controversy surrounding his company. Undoubtedly, he will use that feedback to try improving public perceptions of his social network and make changes to the site. However, many of the problems Facebook faces stem from its business model and the solutions to those problems may not be something Zuckerberg, or Facebook’s shareholders will want to implement. While Zuckerberg and Facebook claim the company’s goal is to bring people together, make no mistake, Facebook’s goal is to be the internet for its users.
Each improvement Facebook has made, each additional service it tacks on, is geared toward keeping eyeballs on its website for as long as possible. Like watching cute animal videos? No need to go to YouTube, just check out Facebook’s videos. Enjoy online shopping, no need to go to Ebay or your newspaper’s classifieds, just look at Facebook. Facebook has come a long way from a simple website that allowed college students to meet and stay in touch. It’s now a digital behemoth that reported $26 billion in revenue in 2016 and claims a group equivalent to China’s population as daily users.
Facebook makes money off of its users by using the information it gathers from them to allow advertisers to specifically target their audiences.
This sounds great for businesses that use the company for advertising, but according to an August 2017 Forbes article titled “Facebook’s Advertising Fallacy: That it Works!,” Facebook advertising isn’t as effective as people are led to believe. One survey cited in the article, from a visual content creation firm called Spachlight, noted that less than one third of 1,512 online consumers surveyed in the U.S. said they were influenced by social media. Another survey from 2016 sited, from a digital engagement platform called Lithium Technologies, found that among 2,000 U.S. consumers, 74 percent of millennials object to advertising in their news feed, with 56 percent of “digital natives” cutting back or stopping their use of social media due to increasing commercialization on Facebook. While some do see great results, the article notes those statistics come from social media agencies where companies invest a lot to get major results.
Major corporations have taken notice too, including Procter and Gamble, the worlds largest advertiser, which started cutting back targeted Facebook advertising in 2016.
We will likely see a dual-sided approach to Facebook’s problems in the coming year. Zuckerberg will have to find ways to convince advertisers that spending money on Facebook is a good investment, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, while addressing public concerns about the social media platform. It’s a tall order to handle for anyone, let alone one of Silicon Valley’s titans and his teams of engineers.
Given the arrogance and self-important attitudes shown by most tech luminaries, Zuckerberg likely underestimates the gravity of the situation that Facebook faces and controversy will likely mount on the company as 2018 progresses.
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