My wife and I visited a friend outside the New York City area this week. We were eating dinner with our a bunch of people and one of them mentioned checking in to the restaurant where we were eating at.
I asked one of them, "what do you use to check in to the restaurant?"
She replied, "Facebook."
I asked her, "do you use Google+ and Foursquare?"
She said, "What is Foursquare? And I have an account on Google+ but only have 4 friends."
I am pretty sure she has more than 4 friends on Facebook. She is a Facebook user, if Facebook keeps on adding features, I do not believe the other competitors will be able to compete with Facebook because it already has the users base. In my opinion, people typically check-in because they want their friends to know what they are doing/eating. If your friend is not on these other sites, why would you join? Does this mean Facebook is here to stay for a long while? Well, according to Facebook's statistics, Yes!! Facebook will be around for a long while.
3 comments:
I agree with you. I think Google+ has a long way to go before it can topple Facebook as the social media leader. One of the major mistakes I believe Google made, is that they allowed initial access to a limited set of people by-invitation-only. While this can work wonders in creating hype and wanting people to sign up, what next? When I got my invitation and signed up, I was disappointed to see that none of my friends were already there. Everyday my news feed was blank, and after a certain point I just stopped logging in to Google+. There was so much more happening on Facebook.
However from the point of view of advertisers and marketers, Facebook cripples their ability of tracking post-click engagement, and they look to Google+ to help solve this problem with its highly anticipated 'brand pages' Full article here. But without the users, I wonder how long advertisers would stick around.
Recent polls show that Facebook's user base in the United States and Canada is declining. However, even if the height of Facebook is behind them, Facebook will continue to be the market leader in social networking as long as it maintains and cultivates its relationships with brands that develop tools and applications like Foursquare. And for the time being, Foursquare can not exist without Facebook, whereas Facebook Places which already exists has the potential and existing user base to take over Foursquare's market share. That said, as a Foursquare user, I am curious as to why someone would prefer to use Facebook Places to check-in over Foursquare, which I feel is a very solid platform.
The location based services industry is growing and should be large enough for many player to successfully exist. Services such as Foursquare might offer the best value to a certain segment to the market ( due to their partnerships) which might differ in value to the offerings by players like Facebook. Therefore people might align to a service based on their partners and the rewards that are associated with it. One service might be more popular then another, but I believe the space is big enough that one player will not own the entire space.
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