Three steps Facebook is working on, to prepare for its next big thing!

Since last year blast of Cambridge Analitica case, Facebook is trying hardly and quickly to get back its users' trust once again, through rapid and frequent updates to the platform as well as sister platforms, Instagram & Whatsapp. Here are three recent and clear areas of focus that Mark and his teams are working on:

Boosting Stories

Whether on instagram, or also on facebook it is clear there is huge focus on boosting this format for maximum usage, and it is working! Facebook's Chief product officer Chris Cox in May 2018 showed a chart detailing how “the Stories format is on a path to surpass feeds as the primary way people share things with their friends sometime next year.”

In January 2019, instagram had reached 500 million daily active users, thus adding up to a total of around 1.25 billion people using the stories options across Mark's three platforms: Facebook, instagram and whatsapp! Moreover, facebook (& instagram) keeps adding options and features frequently to keep it always on the rise.

Integrating Chat

Mark Zuckerberg in January 2019 announced said that he plans to integrate the chat of the three platforms, facebook Messenger, Instragram direct messages and Whatsapp, saying that the apps will remain separate but the technical infrastructure will be unified in order to facilitate the communications between 2.6 billion users, using the three messaging platforms. Zuckerberg mentioned that users over the three platforms will be able to chat with one another no matter which service they’re using. 

Then later in April, at Facebook annual F8 conference, this integration was officially announced, highlighting that all the messages on this integrated platform will be end-to-end encrypted, which is also one of the moves facebook is trying to use for regaining back users confidence.

Lastly in August a spokesman at the company said it plans to rename the apps to “Instagram from Facebook” and “WhatsApp from Facebook.” where this new wording would appear only on app stores and application login screens. Which is also a part of facebook "integration" strategy, also integrating its brands.

Hiding Likes

In May, Instagram started doing a new experiment in Canada, which is hiding the total number of likes and video views. This means that you can see the likes for your own posts, but you dont see likes on others' users posts. In July they announced expanding this test to six more countries, namely Australia, Brazil, Ireland, Italy, Japan and New Zealand.

The idea behind this test is that users always tend to focus and pay attention (unconsciously) more to photos with high number of likes and videos with high number of views regardless the quality of those photos and videos. Instagram said they are doing this because they want your followers to focus on the photos and videos you share, not how many likes they get! This can be considered also a positive move by Facebook by bringing back "Social" media on its original track, rather than having users focusing on buying fake likes and other tricks to gain more admiration and exposure, and become whats so-called "influencers"

And the next big thing is .... Libra!

Libra is facebook's cryptocurrency, was announced a month ago and planned to be launched by mid 2020. Libra’s mission is "to enable a simple global currency and financial infrastructure that empowers billions of people".

While facebook announced that it will not control the currency, but instead they are building a large number of partners where facebook will act as just one of the stakeholders, but on the other hand facebook will heavily use this currency to boost transactions and also ads on its three platforms.

Next steps for you here

Stay tuned for the next article that would focus more on Libra and how it is expected to dramatically change to social media scene, stay tuned here and feel free to share your questions, thoughts and ideas in the comments below.