Product details

Facebook, the most popular social networking site had witnessed phenomenal growth since its inception. Although Facebook was the most widely used social network as of 2014, ‘Facebook Fatigue’ had set in among teens and it had become a ‘social burden’ for them. ‘Taste-shifting teens’ preferred other ‘cool sites’ of niche mobile applications such as WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and KakaoTalk and they emerged as new on-line playgrounds for them. They complained that Facebook had lost its cool once the older generation had logged in and it had become a victim of its own success. With Facebook emerging as a ‘general entity in social’, competitors who offered niche services had penetrated into Facebook’s market. They had stalled Facebook’s hockey stick growth forcing it in the process to reach market saturation. Despite Facebook’s accomplishment of reaching out to one seventh of the world population and emerging as a destination site, teens’ disinterest had become an Achilles heel for Facebook. Teens were considered critical for Facebook’s future growth as they were the early adopters of Facebook ten years ago when it was started. So to revive growth and to invigorate interest among teens, Facebook had bought Instagram for $1 billion in 2012 and made overtures to buy Snapchat, a popular photo-sharing app among teens. Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg had promised to build the best Facebook experience for mobile platforms and was focusing on developing artificial intelligence to innovate its search functions in order to stay relevant and reinvent itself. The case study will attempt to analyse Facebook’s lost interest among teens and the competition posed by mobile application platforms for Facebook. In doing so, it will also analyse Facebook’s initiatives to face the challenges.