Facebook: He just turned 20 but he's already old

Youth Icon For 20 years, Facebook has become a haven for parents. But despite its dated image, the veteran social network continues to attract users from Asia to the United States.

“I will never forget the day I ran to the IT room to sign up for Facebook,” Jasmine Enberg, an analyst at Insider Intelligence, told AFP.

“I had the impression that I belonged to a special club that neither my parents nor my teachers attended, and at the same time, I belonged to a much larger world, with students from all over the United States.”

After its creation by Mark Zuckerberg and his fellow students at Harvard University on February 4, 2004, Facebook spread to other American universities, before opening its doors to everyone in 2006.

The social network, which was then a very new concept, quickly captured the majority of Internet users. In 2023, more than three billion users opened Facebook at least once a month, which is 3% more than in 2022.

“It was a revolution,” says Jasmine Enberg. “Even though Facebook is not great today, whatever one might say is not great about its impact on popular culture, on politics, on our online behavior, on digital content. (…) It has changed the way we communicate.”

This refers to the popular feed, where AI algorithms prioritize messages and images that lead to shares and comments.

Facebook has also contributed significantly to the phenomenon of viral content and the emergence of global online media outlets such as BuzzFeed.

“There is no alternative”

BuzzFeed shut down last year, but Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, is doing just fine. In 2022 – a bad year for the California company – its profits reached $23 billion.

Jasmine Enberg explains that the platform “belongs in the digital landscape,” especially for millennials born in the 1980s and 1990s. “As a result, this product remains irresistible to advertisers due to its reach and performance.”

Facebook is betting on targeting ads with high precision to users on a large scale.

This business model relies on personal data that has cost it numerous lawsuits and fines, from the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018 to the revelations in 2021 of a whistleblower, a former employee, who accused the company of putting profit before the safety of its users. Users.

But neither official condemnations nor the increasingly outdated Facebook image have been able to reverse the trend. The social networking veteran is growing at a slower pace, but he is growing.

“It's like Twitter. Everyone says 'I want to leave', but no one leaves, because there is no alternative,” says Carolina Milanesi of Creative Strategies.

In the United States, users mainly stay in groups formed around common interests (neighbors, art or gardening lovers, celebrity fans, sports teams…), classified ads (Facebook Marketplace) or to keep in touch with certain people. People.

“Mom's friends”

“I use it to find clients because I know my mom's friends are on Facebook,” explains Ruby Hammer, an 18-year-old babysitter from California. “And also to find a car to buy.”

But to talk to her friends, she prefers Snapchat and uploading photos to Instagram.

“Acquire it Instagram “In 2012, moving from desktop to mobile was one of the best business decisions Facebook has ever made,” says Jasmine Enberg.

Of the potential threat, Instagram has become a second heaven for advertisers and thus a huge resource.

“It balances out the decline in interest, especially among young people, in Facebook. Most importantly, the company has an app that can compete with Snapchat and TikTok, which are very popular among teens.”

The diversification of the group's activities has allowed it to continue innovating – in the field of artificial intelligence or metaverses, Mark Zuckerberg's dream – without changing Facebook.

Network pioneer growth is also seen in Southeast Asia, where the mobile app was previously the main gateway to the Internet.

Today, more than half of Facebook users are between the ages of 18 and 34, according to data from Datareporter. However, the real impact is difficult to measure.

“I don't go on Facebook a lot, but everything I post on Instagram automatically appears on Facebook,” says Carolina Milanesi. “So I'm considered 'active'… Maybe the numbers don't reflect reality!”

Source: APE-MPE/AFP