Facebook is an American technology company. The CEO of the company who is also one of the founders of the website Mark Zuckerberg established the company in 2004. The other co-founders are Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, Andrew McCollum, Chris Hughes.

Facebook is a social networking website that allows users to create an account for free. The users can create profiles and be connected to their friends, colleagues, and other people online. People can share photos, blogs, articles, etc. Users can build communities and get the know each other with similar preferences. The main idea of creating Facebook was to bring the world together and understand what’s going on in the world and share and express things.

Features

When it started off in the year 2004 Facebook only had about 8 features which included

• Logging in for free
• Accepting and sending friend requests
• Search for someone through the name, class year, courses, other metadata
• Some of the privacy options were restricted to people who can view your profile.
• Creating profiles with a single picture of a user.
• People can find users with similar interests through the ‘About Me’ section.
• Posting photographs
• Visualize a user’s friend graph.

But now after seventeen years, Facebook brought many changes it has eliminated and upgraded many features some of the best ones are,

1. Newsfeeds: It shows content posted on the network. It shows top stories and the most recent stories to the users.
2. Wall: It uses to write a short message which allowed the user to see the date and time of when the message was written.
3. Timeline: Timeline is where you can see your posts or the posts that you were tagged in are displayed according to the date it was posted.
4. Likes and reactions: Initially, you could click on the thumbs up icon if you like a particular post now not only you can like but also react with different emotes of “Like”, “Love”, “Haha”, “Wow”, “Sad”, or “Angry.”
5. Comments: Anyone can comment on the posts that you have shared.
6. Group: The group option allows the members of the group to share links, media, questions, events, editable documents, and comments on these items.
7. Message: Facebook allows users to live chat with other users. Messenger application allows Facebook users to instantly chat with others using Facebook.
8. Notifications: This feature notifies the user, and something has been added to their profile. For example, if someone commented or liked your post.

Facebook gained popularity

In 2008 facebook started getting popular. It overtook Myspace in the number of unique worldwide visitors in just six years. Which was also a social networking site and was popular at that time in America. And within 10 years, Facebook announced that it had about a billion monthly active users across the globe.

It gained a lot of popularity because.

1. Easy to use: Facebook is very user-friendly and not at all complicated. People find Facebook easier than any other social media platform. Talking about other social media like Twitter people find Facebook uncomplicated.
2. Interesting features: Facebook has some unique and features that keep the audience engaged. One of the main reasons why Facebook has still managed to survive is through these unique features.
3. Changing upgrades: In the world of competition, Facebook comes up with different upgrades to keep them in the game. Those upgrades have always been found beneficial for them.
4. Worldwide audience: Facebook is one of the most used social networking websites. Facebook has around 2.3 billion users, approximately 85 percent was outside the USA.

Is Facebook out of trend?

Facebook has been one of the sustaining and most widely used social media platforms.

Facebook’s popularity has reached its slow down. there always seems to be a dip in the user rate due to the changing trends. For a while, Snapchat gained momentum because of its unique feature which enabled the user to use different filters. But the popularity seemed to decrease due to fewer changes in the upgrade. Although Snapchat isn’t dead yet but isn’t as popular as it was a few years ago. Hence, the biggest factor to consider here is the change in consumer behavior.

Some of the other reasons for the decline in Facebook’s demand could be because the generation gap is one of the factors to be considered. Nowadays Facebook is used by many older generation people. And the younger generation seems to be less interested in using Facebook, for the other platforms like Instagram and Twitter which are more fascinating and trendy. They find facebook too old-fashioned and boring also awkward as their family members would be there to control them.

Ad campaign results aren’t as expected. Due to the divide in the audience companies don’t find it useful to have an ad campaign on Facebook. It also sets a limit on the number of people that see posts and charges money for any extra exposition.

One of the most important reasons has to be the usefulness, as it becomes tough for the newsfeed to remain useful. People are waiting for updates and when that is not met they choose other platforms which offer different features.

Facebook is not dying. Facebook seems to be less cool than it was before, but it definitely has users. Still, many companies find it easy to have their businesses online presence on Facebook and it has shown them tangible results. Hence, it is hard to imagine that it will soon become bygone.

Also Read: Facebook Ad Guidelines To Change – Removes Third Party Data