15 Feb
2010
UPDATE: A couple of notes to clarify this post. First, the chart above, which I pulled from compete.com, shows the top sites that Facebook drives traffic to. Also the headline has been updated to reflect that Facebook is driving more traffic to portals than Google. The San Francisco Chronicle story, linked below, notes that Facebook is only starting to encroach on Google for other sites. The trend, however, still holds.
We're at the beginning of a major shift in how we find, consume and interact with information. If the 2000s was the Google decade, then the 2010s will be the Facebook decade. Already, you can see the writing on the wall - pun intended. Case in point: a search for "google decade danny sullivan" pulls up his Facebook note higher than a blog post (an item I wanted to include here for context). But that's nothing. Look at the data.
"According to Web measurement firm Compete Inc., Facebook has passed search-engine giant Google to become the top source for traffic to major portals like Yahoo and MSN, and is among the leaders for other types of sites.
This trend is shifting the way Web site operators approach online marketing, even as Google takes steps to move into the social-media world.
Some experts say social media could become the Internet's next search engine."
That last line is key. I see Facebook starting to look more like Google while Google tries and stumbles at becoming more social. Bing will start to play a central supporting role here. I see Facebook and Bing becoming an "
Axis of FTW" that will disrupt Google on every front. (Microsoft is an Edelman client.)
You can already see it coming...
- Titan/Facebook Chat will challenge Gmail in communications
- Facebook pages will disrupt Google - especially if they were to integrate Bing Maps and location technology a la Foursquare. This can quickly position Facebook as the Web's Yellow Pages, an area that Google and Yelp currently dominate
- Facebook will make search more social, allowing it to become annotated and curated. This up-ends Google's core business. It also makes the Facebook self-serve advertising model smarter and more effective as it collects more data about where it sends traffic. This threatens Adwords
Social networking is here to stay. It's where attention spirals are flowing and no one looms larger than Facebook. (Link sharing on Facebook
rose 500% in six months.) And while Facebook has plenty of critics and they run into the occasional privacy concerns, I believe that they will dominate the landscape the next few years. In fact, I see them becoming the number one web site in the world in under three years.
It could eat the web.
Now a lot could go wrong. It is possible that Facebook will become
AOL the sequel. But
I don't see it. There's no alternative and the more we put into Facebook the more value we gain from it. This is a different era where vertical integration (e.g. owning and controlling the whole experience) is a
major plus, especially if it's elegant and simple. There's too much information and things vying for our attention today. This turns vertical integration and simplicity into a competitive advantage.
So what does this mean? I believe business web sites will become less important over time. They will be primarily transactional and/or for utility. Brands will shift more of their dollars and resources to creating robust presence where people already are and figure out how to
activate employees en masse in a way that builds relationships and drives traffic back to their sites to complete transactions.
Media companies will do the same - they will be "headless."Google and search will remain important for years to come. However, what we're seeing is the beginning of big changes where social networking and Facebook will further disrupt advertising, media, one-to-one and one-to-many communications, not to mention search.
Comments 47 Comments
Secondly, Facebook turned revenue positive for the first time in September 2009. Google posts multiple billion (read: $X,000,000,000) profits every year. If Google decides Facebook pages are no longer "relevant" they will no longer appear in results. This would seriously negatively impact Facebook. Google are doing Facebook a favour allowing their pages to list in SERPs.
If Google perceived Facebook as a viable threat in the Search space, they would address it. It's not true, so they're not worried. Facebook has neither the money, nor the technology to be a viable Search competitor.
Unless Facebook learn to make money without annoying their free-loading fans, they could become the next Friendster, rather than the next Google.
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/internet_archaeologists_find
I think you're adding 2+2 and coming up with 22.
Facebook needs to work quietly under the hood for a while and allow people to settle in to a consistant social living space to attract more people and calm the present users who are frustrated.
All the best, Ted
I was stunned to hear from a top corporation recently (that caters to B2B!) that Facebook's organic traffic was "neck and neck" with organic traffic from Google -- and that's from a co. servicing the Fortune 100!
I think such tales will now be more common.
Facebook is hitting its tipping point right now (consumer and biz and the two intertwined)
Regarding @Ted’s earlier comment, I agree that Facebook’s constant changes don’t help in the short-term. However, I also believe that unless you know and understand Facebook’s 5-year plan, then it’s hard to determine if these recent facelifts will help or hinder its growth. I personally have no clue where Facebook plans to be in 5-years, but I can tell you that I’ll be watching to see if it can hang on.
second platform leadership. facebook cannot compete on integration of data services, which is where all the value is. there is no evidence to date that fb has demonstrated this capability current fb developers as a value-network does not cut it. leadership: zuckerberg is obsessed with platform domination. domination as a strategy is bankrupt on the web - esp as it increasingly becomes ecosystemic and distributed - web as a platform model (this is you aol argument).
search monetization. this is a tough nut to crack. don't under estimate the corporate competencies facebook needs to succeed at this.
i'll give facebook something - they've pooled some amazing talent (notably sheryl sandberg - if anyone can drive monetization - she can), but i don;t think it will be enough to be more dominant than google.
The very social media explosion and mass adoption of the last decade, has taken place in forms that I dare say could not be predicted even by the best minds, especially when it comes to the relative humble beginnings of some of the most popular ones.
Case in point, Facebook, started by the vision of young college students, now the de-facto standard place, for electronic socialization and contact for a large part of the internet population; who could have predicted that.
I've sent this to our entire staff at Bizzuka. Given that we do Web design, Web development and online marketing, this shift could have huge impact on the way we do business in the near future. I'm hopeful our staff will pay heed.
Not search and not email. Nor any other one of the gadgets they've created.
Advertising. The cash. It's going to slip away.
Google will not exist in two years.
http://searchengineland.com/hulu-traffic-controversy-pits-comscore-vs-nielsen-19336
I've seen more intelligent conversation on Google Buzz in a few days than I have seen in Facebook in a few years. There is also a lot more proper discussion than Twitter. Based on that, I think it will be far more important for business - especially since its integrated with a great email system that can be used as a domain email (Buzz will be there soon too).
You can go to Google Buzz right now and have a serious discussion which explores ideas more completely. The fact that its at the moment a poor mans FriendFeed is irrelevant. It's the user base.
There is no way I'll be dropping Gmail for Facebook Mail any time soon. Facebook is for socializing not discussing business. People go there to socialize, not to shop or looking for some kind of business solution.
Facebook is for events, photos, small talk, entertainment, and gaming.
Most of the referrals to portals from Facebook will be for the portal gossip pages.
Celebrity gossip is huge - that's why so many major newspapers online sites have sacrificed serious news and credibility for the page views that gossip brings.
I just do not see this happening.
I do think that businesses will shift how they market and integrate social media in their marketing mix (we see that now) but I highly doubt businesses would let their websites wither and put all their eggs in the social media world, be it Facebook, etc.
The ability to have individual expression and control of the entire user experience, I think, is too important to some businesses to allow them to become an iframe within a social media website.
Yes some businesses will may go that route and succeed. But I never see the importance of individual websites waning.
The simple fact is: consumers are fickle. We've see time spend averages come down inside Facebook and an aging audience....which says to me we may one day see Facebook fall like many other dominating platforms.
Google is 'Google' because at the outset they built traffic volume by providing efficient and relevant search results. That traffic volume was then leveraged and monetized through an innovative ad platform (Adwords). As traffic grew they continued to innovate and exposed their visitors to an increasing amount of products and services that paid off the Google brand - its classic digital marketing! Grow your online traffic in order to provide exposure to you product and service.
Facebook has grown traffic and users, but they haven't become indispensable to people like Google has. They are a social property that connect friends, families and make interaction easy.
I like the notion of push discovery vs. pull discovery. and to sum up my ramble - I think I like the business of pull discovery vs. push.
we'll see how this all unfolds!!
Facebook, first of all, is not a business site. Facebook is an entertainment site. That said, it is not logical to think that Facebook will replace search engines neither in the short nor the long term. Facebook is popular because people like to have fun. When you need to research, study or work, you don't ask your friends about it. You do your own research.
Now, there might be a few things that I would ask my friends over Facebook rather than "researching" myself, but they will not be serious things, definitely. I may ask how good or lousy a bar might be on Facebook, for example; but I wouldn't ask what's the best place to have my teeth fixed because they will decidedly not have the answer.
You believe business sites will become less important over time? Great, then I should start saving money to buy my goods on Farmville right? Sorry but I'll pass. That is not going to happen.
Facebook will not eat the web either. Facebook is a fashion, just like MySpace was years ago, or Geocities, or Dmoz, or Altavista. Sooner or later, it will fall like all the rest.
From Peru,
Tedel
One, people will soon catch on to the fact that if they become a fan of a particular product or service, they've just allowed that company to see not just their personal information, but also their friends' information. They will know birthdates, zipcodes, gender, marital status, professions, hobbies and whatever else they choose to share on their profile page. They'll, get to see pictures of friends and family. With all this rich information, they can target their products not just to fans, but also their unsuspecting friends and family.
Two, marketers have a habit of abusing a medium. I see them eventually cluttering everybody's wall with useless information far too many times. I'm already seeing this on Twitter and Retweets. The message becomes less and less subtle: "I'm a consultant. I have a blog - read my story. Aren't I so insightful? I'm really good at what I do and maybe you'll contact me and hire me for your next project." (Insert eye-roll emoticon here.)
Three, marketers tend to jump on the hot bandwagon before fully understanding the medium. Let's get on Facebook. Oh look, we've got fans. Let's send them useless messages. Yes, send the grandmother the ad too and invite them to be a fan. Oh lookie here, we have our fans' email addresses... Marketers don't get that social networking or social media is about "social" and not media. Social media has existed long before the Internet was born and was truly a means of sharing knowledge with like-minded people you've never met. That has NOT changed. Marketers would do well to understand social media's purpose: to engage in conversations with the consumer on a personal level.
Example: I'm a fan of JetBlue on Facebook. When they post on my wall that they're offering special fares to Mexico, I honestly couldn't give a crap so I deleted it. And if they do this any more often, I'm either going to hide their posts or un-friend them. But if a real employee from JetBlue wrote "Hey, Rebecca, you just got back from DR. Great pics! How was the flight?" My response would have been "You guys rock!" And that's a priceless message for all their fans to see.
Very Good coments to read here!
Regards
I should be able to find the right data and the right amount and I strongly believe it can be achieved only through social networking. Although am not sure whether the the social networking present would be able to achieve this yet in the years to come things hopefully would change more and then it would only the process.
Anyways thanks again for your post Steve.
In the same period, the site received traffic from:
Google:10,000 visits (organic), Bounce Rate: 18%, Time on Site: 4 minutes, Conversion Rate: 20%
Facebook: 150 visits Bounce Rate: 28%, Time on Site: 2:30 minutes, Conversion Rate: 12%.
Both the website and Facebook presence have been up for the same amount of time. There is not a single metric on any site I manage where Facebook delivers better stats in any area - traffic, conversion, sales, engagement, return visits etc. - compared to Google. Period.
Long story short, no matter how you cook it, Facebook DOES NOT deliver compared to Google. People who make unsupported statements based on no, or poor data, be warned. Your clients will sack you when you give them crap advice.