Facebook to the left, WhatsApp to the right

Facebook and Zuckerberg had a rough time in 2018: user privacy was leaked, big data mined user habits, fake news was rampant, and even interfered with elections... Although Zuckerberg went to hearings in the United States and Europe to prove his innocence, Facebook, which has 2.3 billion users, still cannot escape infamy. What should Facebook do next? How to attract more young users to use Facebook? How to solve the revenue slowdown? - Revenue increased by 37% in 2018 and 54% in 2017. In comparison, revenue has shown signs of slowing down significantly. On March 7, Zuckerberg wrote a long article "A Privacy-Focused Vision for Social Networking centered on owned channels (A Privacy-Focused Vision for Social Networking)" to respond to concerns and systematically elaborated on Facebook's development in a more private and secure direction, focusing on the most basic and private instant messaging, and on this basis launching value-added functions including video chat, group chat, stories and payment. The picture accompanying the historical article has expired We know that Facebook’s traffic, including Instagram’s, is traffic focused on the public square, which is different from Twitter—although Twitter also has social relationships, Twitter pays more attention to content. Facebook is a social community of acquaintances with strong relationships. Users post on it to record their moods and share bits and pieces of their lives, and their friends like and comment on it. Although they are all social networks with acquaintances, they are different from QQ. QQ is actually a social network developed based on instant messaging. Facebook was born in the PC Internet era. Because of the invention and creation of NewsFeed and the construction of a powerful recommendation algorithm, it gained a large number of users and occupied a large amount of users' reading time. Facebook currently has 2.3 billion monthly active users, and it mainly relies on advertising to make money. Its advertising revenue accounts for more than 98% of its total revenue. WhatsApp is different. WhatsApp is an instant messaging tool based on address books, which itself completely started on the mobile Internet. According to the more popular definitions now, it can be considered that Facebook is public domain traffic, Instagram is also public domain traffic, and WhatsApp is owned audience. Regarding public domain and owned channels, everyone currently has no unified understanding of this. The mainstream opinion is that all traffic controlled by the platform can be considered as public domain traffic; any traffic that can be fully controlled by oneself is owned audience. For Facebook, whether you publish a post on your personal homepage, a public homepage, or a group, its reach rate (reach rate) cannot be 100%. In fact, 5% is good. The reach rate of your post has something to do with the number of your fans, but not much. It has something to do with the quality of your post, but it has little bearing. Now the reach rate of Facebook posts is extremely Low, and has a tendency to become lower and lower. This reach rate is not determined by the individual publisher but by the platform. Facebook constantly adjusts its algorithm to lower your reach rate. The root cause is that Facebook is an advertising company—a company that relies on the content distribution of information streams to monetize ads. It also has a powerful advertising backend. In order to maintain the platform's own interests, it must not allow you to reach more customers through operations. On WhatsApp, whether you use the business version or the Personal plan, if you send a message to a group, everyone in the group can see it; if you post a status on the dynamic page, all your friends can see it; if you post a status (about) on the settings page, all friends can also see it. From the user experience point of view, because you have been on Facebook for a long time, you will always add some unfamiliar friends, strangers you have never met, and a post you publish will be visible to them, even without being a friend. If you set the post to be public, all Facebook users and non-Facebook users can see it. It is like being in a city square. Chatting on WhatsApp has both one-to-one and one-to-many chats, which can completely guarantee your sense of privacy and meet your privacy needs. From the perspective of commercial monetization, public domain traffic is currently mainly monetized through advertising. Whether it is Google, Baidu, Taobao, JD.com, or even Toutiao, including the global expansion information application lopscoop that recently launched in India, they essentially rely on advertising for monetization. Owned audience can be monetized using advertising, but it is mainly monetized through value-added services (memberships, games) and social e-commerce based on payment. In fact, this value and imagination space are also greater. Zuckerberg said in the article: "Public social networks will continue to be very important in people’s lives – Connect with everyone you know, discover new people, ideas and content, and give people a wider voice. People find these valuable things every day, and there are still many useful services that can be built on top of them. But now, with all the ways people also want to interact privately, there's an opportunity to build a simple platform that's more privacy-focused”。 In the article, Xiao Zha attempts to open up the messaging mechanisms of Facebook and WhatsApp, which is actually to open up the account systems of Facebook and WhatsApp. In this regard, I think good is naturally good. It is extremely beneficial for Facebook to integrate its resources and even for advertisers to place ads. However, opening up is a double-edged sword, which may lead to improper use of data and catastrophic consequences for privacy security. The picture accompanying the historical article has expired Facebook's revenue in 2018 was US$56 billion. Although it faces problems of one kind or another, Facebook still shoulders the important task of growing the company's current performance. The company cannot make major changes to its business model. If it changes significantly, the consequences of its failure will not be something Xiaoza can bear, and investors will not agree. Therefore, for F For the development of acebook and Instagram, it is more stable and reasonable to stick to the current development direction and monetize through advertising. On Facebook and Instagram, create good graphics, pictures, videos, dynamics, stories, live broadcasts and other usage scenarios, so that users can better express themselves and get a better user experience. At the same time, fully copying WeChat on WhatsApp and implementing WeChat's proven successful business model globally based on WhatsApp is the most likely to succeed and has greater room for imagination. So for things that are not available on WhatsApp, such as WeChat’s official account, and similar functions (public pages) that already exist on Facebook, should we do it again or let merchants use it on Facebook? I personally think that we should abandon the past design ideas and adopt new business processes, new product strategies and business monetization ideas, and implement them again; and Wha tsApp’s status (Status) is currently relatively simple and not playable enough. It can be modeled after WeChat’s Moments and be further enhanced to give users a better sense of privacy. Advertising monetization must also be extremely restrained. It was originally rumored that the commercialization of WhatsApp started with Status. In fact, no relevant actions have been seen until now. Perhaps it is because Status is not active enough? For the most important payment, WhatsApp has currently launched WhatsApp payment in India. If it has certain advantages in India and then expands to other countries, WhatsApp's business closed loop in the mobile Internet will be completed. This process is not that easy, because in terms of payment, Facebook faces PayPal, Apple in the United States and even around the world. Pay, and these two have first-mover advantages, and they are facing strong competition from Paytm in India - Paytm already has more than 200 million users, and in terms of payment scenarios, Facebook itself has not built a relatively heavyweight payment scenario. We know that WeChat payment can only rise under the strong dominance of Alipay because it has performed well in travel, food delivery, red envelopes, and Spring Festival Gala. It has not lost to its opponents, and won the last two battles to establish its status in the world. If WhatsApp payment wants to make a difference, it must integrate with the local market and find a breakthrough. To occupy the market country by country, in fact, there are still tough battles to be fought. In any case, it is feasible to start a country, such as India, and develop payment services well and thoroughly, then expand to other countries and localize it from a global perspective. It is conceivable that as an emerging market with the largest number of WhatsApp users in a single country, Facebook will increase its investment in the Indian market in the future. There is no doubt that many ideas will be tried in India first and then expanded globally. Once these constructions are completed, Facebook will have a community social network ecology based on city squares, and an instant messaging social network ecology based on private living rooms. Advertising on the left will be monetized, and e-commerce on the right will be monetized, and a new business empire will be created.