It’s been a while since my last text-post, but I figured it was about time after Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp last week. Consider my view as supplementary, as I do not disagree with those advocating the acquisition based on number of mobile users, reach in emerging markets etc.
A few years ago, notifications were a great growth hack. A user received a personal message, and as long as frequency of these were low enough it triggered interest/app-usage. As said frequency drastically has increased since then, users have been trained to ignore the majority of these notifications and built up a filter. If an app sends too many unwanted notifications it is most likely ignored, and the app is muted or even removed. Said filter favors human-generated notifications (messages, snapchats, tweets etc) over computer-generated notifications (ie. “you haven’t visited the app in a week”). Companies like Foursquare understands this, and that this is why they try to facilitate for more human-created notifications with their update a few months ago.
Zuckerberg naturally understands this as well. In a future with even more noise, what sort of social communication will get through users’ always-improving notification-filter? One thing I believe is completely certain is that one-to-one communication (read: messaging) always will receive more user attention than one-to-many broadcasting (read: news feeds). Both WhatsApp and Snapchat are leaders in this space (messaging/ephemeral messaging respectively), and it is a space with obvious network-effects. If you want to control social, you want to control these apps.
Facebook sells advertising. If you want to sell advertising, you’d rather be where users focus most of their attention. They already know enough about their users to sell targeted ads – their next challenge is conversion. I believe it is safe to say that conversion is higher where users pay more attention.
Smart move.