Facebook strategy shifts away from public posts to private encrypted messages

Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg announced this week that the company would increase focus on private, encrypted services shifting emphasis away from public posts. Zuckerberg said he was changing the company to focus less on sharing and more on creating private experiences. This reflects the shift in behavior of people online which has shown a reduction of growth in social media. While public sharing of data is slowing down, growth of private messengers such as WhatsApp and WeChat have seen strong growth, especially outside the US. Zuckerberg said Facebook would achieve the shift partly by integrating it’s multiple existing messaging platforms -  Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger.

Zuckerberg in a Congressional hearing few months back famously gave a one-line answer to describe Facebook’s business model saying “Senator, we run ads”. The social media giant, valued at $490 billion, currently depends on people openly sharing posts to be able to target advertising to them. While the company will not eradicate public sharing, a proliferation of private and secure communications could seemingly hurt its business model. Other firms that depend on Facebook to harvest data based on material that people openly share will also need to evolve based on this new strategy.

However, some analysts believe that the advertising business model which Facebook has created over the years may not need to change too much. Facebook doesn’t need to know exactly what people are messaging to each other. According to Zuckerberg, Facebook doesn’t use message content to target ads. Many app developers unconnected with Facebook share personal data with the social media giant. This sharing has become so common place that its considered as “industry standard practice” to share data with Facebook. This means you might be seeing an ad based on activity completely outside Facebook. This coupled with techniques such as location targeting makes Facebook quite independent of public posts on its own platform to profit from ads. Also moving to private messaging may result in a higher conversion rate. It allows for much more granular targeting. The potential of someone paying attention to an add on a private messenger is higher than on a public platform. This new strategy shift will create unique challenges as well as potential opportunities for the digital marketing industry.