Will there ever be a Facebook killer?

Facebook is everywhere, it can be found on most websites, blogs, other social networks and everywhere else you can think of on the internet. It is no surprise with that much presence around the web that Facebook has gained 800 million users in 7 years.

Many have tried to compete with Facebook over the years yet none have threatened the Social Giant allowing Facebook to just kept growing. Perhaps its only real competitor being MySpace, once worth $500 million but only sold for $35 million earlier this year...

Facebook is so powerful that it isn’t afraid to take risks even when the users hate the idea. On numerous occasions Facebook has changed its layouts and functions, which users have complained in the thousands but still Facebook, keep growing.

So why have all these competing websites failed to live up to the hype? Most of these sites have failed to get a great deal of users, which either means Facebook is just too good to leave or the competition aren’t fulfilling the user’s needs.

Privacy issues...

A great business strategy is to look at a business and see what it’s doing wrong.

Facebook are constantly ridiculed about their privacy settings so Social websites such as Diaspora have tried to take on Facebook by providing better privacy services by tightening up privacy options. The problem with focusing too much on privacy is it does affect usability.

Setting up an account becomes a pain with lots of tweaking that needs to be done. Is this what users really want... of course not.

Although users constantly complain and even lawsuits have been filed Facebook still continue to grow as the majority of people don’t really care too much about privacy.

As a user I could say I’m a little worried about Facebook collecting and sharing my private data but if I chose to abandon my Facebook account I would miss out of a lot of events, information about my friends and family and the latest news from sites I have subscribed to.

Providing us with more privacy options isn’t enough, to even put a dent into the Social giant you would have to give people something new, compelling and cool.Â

The rise of Facebook

Social websites these days usually try to directly compete with Facebook, which in my opinion is like a new start independent agent trying to compete with Rightmove. It’s just never going to happen.

At the time when Facebook began, MySpace was king. Facebook wasn’t an overnight sensation, it grow organically over the years by targeting colleges, then gradually expanding to states, then countries and eventually the world. Blowing MySpace out of the water...

Most new social networks aim to high, expecting millions of users from day one. The websites are open to anyone and everyone, normally posted about on high profile blogs as ‘Facebook’s competition’ leading to a few thousand users signing up but then disappearing very quickly.

The users that sign up get bored as not enough of their friends are posting or using the website. Why use a social site that only a handful of your friends use when hundreds already use Facebook daily.

A good example of this is Google+, while the site has managed to reach 40 million users it is still not effecting Facebook. Google+ was overly hyped and then didn’t deliver, the talk about Google+ vanished quickly and although it managed to reach 40 million users in just a few months, it has declined as quickly as it rose.

Google still control search...

Google has been around for 15 years now, dominating search for the majority of its life. Nothing has really shaken up Google with it controlling 92% of the search market in the UK. Bing and Yahoo search have made fair attempts to compete with Google but people have accepted the fact that they are going to get the best results from Google.

Facebook are the equivalent of social networks, if you want to socialise Facebook is where you are going to get the best results.

By Luke Stanley
SEO Consultant