Welcome to Cosmic’s blog! My name is Jamie Dabrowiecki, I’m eighteen years old and I am working here at Cosmic having recently been appointed as Digital Apprentice. You will see me here talking about social media, particularly Facebook as you will see in this post.
Facebook – the social media platform you can spend hours of your day browsing without even realising it.
Zuckerberg’s Facebook is used by around one billion people every month (source: Guardian.co.uk), but is that changing? Last month, Facebook lost around 600,000 users. This is common for sites to lose activity during the festive period, so you could quite happily say that Facebook has nothing to worry about.
For me this is not the case. In my opinion, and that of many of my friends Facebook is changing; and not for the better. It seems that the social media giant is never satisfied with what they have, and are regularly changing layout, appearance and features. There is the saying “don’t fix what isn’t broken” and I think there are pros and cons for this. Every time that Facebook changes something, people complain and moan about how they “want the old Facebook back” and how they strongly dislike the new look and feel to the site. From the top of my head I can think of this happening at least 3 times in my short time of around 4 to 5 years on the site. But somehow, they manage to pull it off every time. Even after the consistent whinging from my friends, people get used to the new look after a few weeks, then the site changes again and it’s a never-ending process which I am sick of seeing.
Design I can get over; it’s what the users are doing that are ruining the Facebook experience for me. This is an issue that has strongly bugged for me a little while, and it’s making me spend less time using Facebook and I am using sites such as Twitter and Instagram a lot more. A feature recently implemented by Facebook which was known as ‘Subscribers’ or ‘Subscribing’ (now renamed to Followers/Following), has turned people into mindless posting robots. When I signed up initially Facebook was a site where I could chat to friends and talk to family who live out of town, but now it seems people consider themselves to be somewhat ‘internet famous’ as it’s known.
I see this particularly in teenagers, usually aged between 15 and 19 (unfortunately my age group), and it’s starting to get out of hand. Rather than using this as a quick and easy method to contact friends and family, people now seem to just post generic content on the site in order to gain ‘Likes’ and Followers, rather than using the site for what it was created for. If I opened up my Facebook now and scrolled down the Timeline, I could hazard a guess of five out of ten of the posts being pictures or text posts shared in order to gain likes and followers. Personally I don’t see why people would wish for this, I want to use Facebook to talk to people and share things I like, not to receive a meaningless number on my profile of people I don’t know and probably never will.
I think it’s a great shame; Facebook is a great site but a percentage of users are ruining my experience on the site and I am spending far less time on it, as are some of my friends – some have even terminated their accounts!
But, it’s not all bad. I know a handful of young people who are maximizing Facebook’s capabilities in order to create a successful home business. These include clothing lines, arts and crafts, photography and journalism. This isn’t just on Facebook either, I see linked accounts on Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, YouTube and more – all great ways of promoting the brand, getting increased custom and attracting new audiences.
So it’s not all doom and gloom for Facebook’s teens; behind the barrage of generic posts and links, there is a community utilizing Facebook to create a successful home business.
But what do you think of the current state of Facebook, Inc? Have any of the recent changes affected your experience using Facebook? Or maybe you are one of the 600,000 members no longer actively using the site?