Facebook’s Incredible Effect On The Web [CHART]
Facebook is eating up more and more of the time we spend on the web at the expense of all other sites, according to an analysis by Ben Elowitz CEO and founder of Wetpaint. If you exclude online video and mobile web consumption, Elowitz claims, "the web is shrinking." In the future marketers should spend less time on SEO and more time on optimizing for Facebook, argues Elowitz.
Chart and more at AllThingsD.
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It scares me every time I see an article like this that only looks at numbers and not the behavior behind the numbers.
Yes, FB has a lot of people on it, but what are they doing? The teens are chatting – you can’t market there directly, you have to hope they are talking about you, but you can’t chime in.
Adults are, well, posting about babies and pictures of them doing whatever and talking to their friends. How do you get in there? Very, very difficult.
Facebook Pages might be a necessity, BUT you need to get them at the “like”, because they will never be back (typically- especially teens).
We need to move away from the numbers and towards what’s actually going on on these networks and create strategies around that. Social media is a great way to get discovered, but “just being there” and sending out updates isn’t going to be the magic bullet to selling records.
In the late 90s and early 00s, it used to be all the rage to have your own website. In the mid-00s, having your own blog was big. Then, MySpace came and took a bite out of the “market share” of the blogosphere. Bloggers visited there, liked the easy interoperability and in turn, migrated their blogs.
By now, Facebook has eaten up a lot of the amateur online content creators that used to populate the blogosphere and other online communities that came before it. But so have Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr.
It seems like these companies have found ways of exploiting the DIY attitude which laid the groundwork to the worldwide web we know today.
There is a DIY attitude prevalent today in the world of independent music today. Artists better beware not to find themselves exploited in a similar fashion.
And Facebook is rather different to the web of old with its private websites because back then, you used to have much more of a jester’s license in what you were doing whereas now, all your so-called friends are watching you under your real name while you don’t want to make a fool of yourself.
Unfortunately thus, I feel a loss of freedom has come upon the blogosphere during its migration movement towards Facebook. Add to that the fact that it’s far less easy to discover new people if you cannot search profiles by interest and must rely on what the almighty friend recommendation algorithm has in store for you, and Facebook does not seem that green a pasture anymore.
Yes, the web seems to be shrinking at this point but once Facebook has eaten up too much of it, they will get a competition rights lawsuit that will force them to open up the wall that keeps their content (which by the way, you the user are creating voluntarily and donating to them) under lock and key so that “independent” search engines will finally gain access.
I guess Web 1.0 will be back. And the fact that you as an artist will want to promote your content to people who don’t have a Facebook will contribute to that development.
You can’t count on any single platform like Facebook to promote your music. All independent artist has to do is look at MySpace and MP3.com before that. Both of those places literally shut out independent artists and turned those platforms into de facto conduits for the major corporations. MP3.com is no more and MySpace is on its way to being that because no one goes there for the reasons they used to. It is no longer networking friendly for independent music. Modern Era Music History will repeat itself within this paradigm many times over due to the typical corporate mindset that comes in and takes over these grass roots initiated platforms, then implements the same practices that have been less than effective for their own companies. This seems to always be the scenario that is played out since the advent of online music distribution and marketing. Facebook is good for reaching several thousand (less than 20k) people at the most, if you are not one of the major media artists. It is important to simply diversify your interests and always maintain your own official site as the hub. Facebook is good for lots of things, including promoting music and shows. I get so many invites that I don’t even read most of them. I use Facebook mainly to connect with people I actually know (family and real friends). Occasionally, the people who are friends due to me being a musician and label co-founder, interact with me in a meaningful way – but, rarely. So, I would not get too excited about things like Facebook … Cb