Facebook Getting Aggressive With Users -- Who Don't Use...
Facebook Really Wants You to Come Back
The social network is getting aggressive with people who
don’t log in often, working to keep up its engagement numbers.
By Sarah Frier January 31, 2018, 2:00 AM PST
It’s been about a year since Rishi Gorantala deleted the
Facebook app from his phone, and the company has only gotten more aggressive in
its emails to win him back. The social network started out by alerting him
every few days about friends that had posted photos or made comments—each time
inviting him to click a link and view the activity on Facebook. He rarely did.
Then, about once a week in September, he started to get
prompts from a Facebook security customer-service address. “It looks like
you’re having trouble logging into Facebook,” the emails would say. “Just click
the button below and we’ll log you in. If you weren’t trying to log in, let us
know.” He wasn’t trying. But he doesn’t think anybody else was, either.
“The content of mail they send is essentially trying to
trick you,” said Gorantala, 35, who lives in Chile. “Like someone tried to
access my account so I should go and log in.”
Facebook, which has more than 2 billion people logging in
monthly, has never failed to grow its user base. To beat investors’
expectations consistently on user numbers, it’s just as important for the company
to retain people like Gorantala as it is to recruit new members. People who are
logging into Facebook less often—but aren’t fully disconnected—are noticing
more and more frequent prompts to come back, sometimes multiple times a day,
via emails or text messages reminding them what they’re missing out on,
according to screenshots and reports from users around the world. Gorantala,
who eased off his Facebook usage because of privacy concerns, said his security
prompt comes “whenever I don’t log in for a few days.”
Even with regular users, Facebook has become thirstier
for posts. The social network’s reminder boxes at the top of the news feed,
which often show memories or anniversaries of friendship with close pals, have
recently become real estate for more trivial milestones—like being tagged in 10
photos with someone or getting 100 heart reactions.
Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said earlier this
year that Facebook was going to rethink the formula for its news feed to put an
emphasis on posts from friends and family, downplaying content from brands and
media. The company will emphasize “time well spent,” aiming for meaningful
interactions that will be better for users long-term. It cautioned that the
changes could cause some measures of engagement to go down, because people may
spend less time on the app reading articles and watching videos.
But engagement may have been a concern for Zuckerberg
before the announcement. While the company has said it sees positive trends, it
hasn’t updated a statistic on how much time people spend on its properties
since the first quarter of 2016. Minutes spent on the site in the U.S. are
declining, according to measurements by both Nielsen and Comscore, even if the
trend is healthy globally. In the third quarter, the growth in daily users was
the slowest ever.
“You could argue that the actions they announced were in
response to what they were observing,” said Brian Wieser, an analyst at Pivotal
Research. “Given how big they are, you’re going to run into a wall at some
point.”
Facebook's financial results are showing no signs of struggle
so far. Analysts project Facebook on Wednesday will report another quarter of
record sales, bringing annual revenue to $40.3 billion. There’s still plenty of
room to grow in the mobile-advertising market, which Facebook dominates
alongside Alphabet Inc.’s Google, the digital-ad leader. This quarter, revenue
will probably see a boost from people watching video ads.
And no matter what happens with the flagship Facebook
app, the company owns several other huge platforms for communicating with
friends—Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger that are just starting to seriously
generate revenue.
Still, investors are watching for any comments or clues
about audience growth and user habits. Bumps in the trend line are a reminder
that Facebook's continued dominance is not inevitable, and any protracted
decline in engagement could eventually curb its appeal to advertisers.
In order to count as a monthly active user, someone must
have logged into or shared content on Facebook at least once in the last 30
days of the quarter. Facebook’s biggest barrier to growth is its
already-unprecedented size. The internet, in total, has about 3.6 billion
users. For the roughly 1.6 billion of those who aren’t regular Facebook users,
almost half are likely in China, where Facebook is banned by the government.
For the rest, it’s unclear how many do have accounts that they just don’t use,
or decided to delete. “Nobody would ever talk about that,” Wieser said.
Facebook says there are “many reasons” why users might
get notifications from the company. “We’re always looking for ways to help
people access their accounts more quickly and easily, especially when there are
notifications from friends they may have missed,” spokeswoman Lisa Stratton
said in an email. The security emails are “not a re-engagement tactic,” the
company said.
The new mini-celebrations, for occasions such as a
milestone number of photos tagged with a particular friend, were rolled out in
August because focus groups told Facebook they liked celebrating memories. The
Menlo Park, California-based company said it had nothing to add on its
engagement numbers.
It’s standard for all types of companies to use email and
text messages to re-engage their customers. Facebook’s stand out for their
frequency and personalization, users said. The company does it because it
works.
Kuldeep Patil, 32, deleted the app from his phone many
months ago and says he gets at least two messages wooing him back each day.
They used to be related to people that were interacting with his account, tagging
him in photos or inviting him to like pages. “Kuldeep, you have 90 new
notifications, 6 messages, 1 poke and 4 group invites,” a typical subject line
reads, from an email he got in December.
Like Gorantala, Patil, who lives in India, decreased his
usage due to concerns over Facebook tracking his activity. He said the messages
have gotten more annoying recently as they start to flag updates that he’s not
even involved with—a person from his past commenting on his or her own photo,
for example.
But sometimes, he admits, he'll click.
“I guess that’s why I haven’t deleted the account yet,”
Patil said. But after clicking, while he’s scrolling through the feed, he gets
uncomfortable watching the “same bunch of people posting only good things.”
He’ll close it quickly.
It’s that kind of activity—idle scrolling to compare
one’s own life to others’—that even Facebook admits is depressing. As part of a
reckoning over the company’s impact on society, Facebook released a study in
December that acknowledged it could be harmful for people's mental health to
use the app passively, reading others’ posts without contributing or reacting.
If people interact with their close friends, commenting and sharing, that can
actually positively impact mental health, the study concluded. That helped
inform Zuckerberg’s decision to focus on friends and family in the news feed.
In other words, the solution for the ills of Facebook, in
Facebook’s academic opinion, is more Facebook. “It's convenient,” said Judson
Brewer, director of research at University of Massachusetts Medical School's
Center for Mindfulness, who has written about technology addiction. “It all
sounds great, that they want to do this, but they still need to keep their user
base because that's how they make money.”
As Facebook has continued to grow, it’s given users many
reasons for malaise. There was the situation that sparked the company’s
re-thinking of its mission—the revelation that Russia had for months used the
site to spread fake news and sow social discord around the 2016 U.S.
presidential election—and also a sprinkling of mini-crises, like live-streamed
violent videos and the uncovering of racist ad-targeting options. But several
users said their reasons for tuning out Facebook usage were much simpler: It
was overwhelming. It wasn’t fun. It was too public.
The longer people use Facebook, the more people they
become connected with, and the less intimate the feed feels. Gorantala became
conscious of how much the site knew about him, as well as his activity on the
rest of the internet. He felt it would be too extreme to delete his Facebook
account entirely. It still contained a record of photos of him, and some social
contacts that weren’t on his phone.
Several others said they remained users, but not frequent
ones, because they weren't sure how to actually delete their accounts. On the
website, a user has to put in a request to Facebook to have an account deleted.
But many people choose the simpler “deactivate” option instead, which preserves
all their data should they choose to come back. Brewer said his wife makes the
choice to deactivate frequently, then gets the emails and comes back to
Facebook.
Rogério Pereira, a user in Portugal, said among his
friends it’s understood that there’s only one way to make sure you never go
back.
“You must ask your friend to say you’re dead so they
convert your account into a memorial,” he said.
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