Why The Future Of Communities Is In Your Own App

Social media is dying. Meta’s earnings call is just the latest signal that Facebook is no longer the ultimate destination for brand awareness and customer engagement. The tech giant’s profits fell in half compared to the same period last year. This sent the stock price skyrocketing.

It’s the young users migrating to newer platforms like TikTok at the expense of a drastic decline in digital advertising (thanks to Apple’s App Tracking Transparency) and Meta’s Facebook and Instagram.

A new wave of social apps is experiencing explosive growth among Gen Z users and beyond, but a simple truth remains. If you don’t own the platform, you don’t have full control over user interaction. This should force businesses to pause as they think about their next steps.

how did we get here

Facebook circa 2010 will almost certainly of A place for companies to build communities. At the time, other social his platforms weren’t without community, but Facebook had the lowest common ground.

Businesses created business pages, encouraging viewers to “like” them and inviting consumers to engage with the content there. All this was fine, until it wasn’t.

About five years later, the company realized that its Facebook page wasn’t generating organic engagement among its fans. A closer look reveals that Facebook’s algorithms now have control over what was previously organic reach. A new revenue model for the social giant was born. Businesses have started paying Facebook to show people their content through boosted posts and advertising campaigns.

Today, given the iOS 14 update and the future of cookieless advertising, Facebook is limited in the amount of user data it collects from third parties, which limits its ability to target ads with the same granularity. it is conventional. Coupled with younger generations’ preference for other social sites and services, business is at a crossroads.

Organizations have spent millions of dollars building communities on Facebook over the years, and communities, like technology, are constantly evolving. Facebook is no longer serving the needs of businesses well enough, but communities are more important to brands than ever.

Fortunately, there are better, more decentralized ways to build it.

Go solo to build community

The community that once made Facebook one of the world’s largest platforms thrives within individual applications instead. These applications can be purposeful and engaging so that the community becomes part of the overall experience. So the new best way to build an active and relevant community around your brand is not jumping on another social site, but bringing it to another social site. Your own app.

The community is your property, so set the rules. We know our users best and can provide a space that fits their needs to connect with others, find information, and create.When you design an environment that provides the functionality that users want When If you respect their privacy (assuming you don’t sell or share their data), you have a chance to create a thriving community that adds value to your business.

Use the in-app community to connect naturally to topics and businesses. Compare the following two basic scenarios.

1. A user is playing a video game, pauses the game, makes a Facebook post, and before restarting the game, may or may not understand what the person is saying. I have.
2. During gameplay, users create topic-based group chat, voice or video messages and send them directly to people actively participating in the game.

Which scenario brings the highest level of engagement and enjoyment? The answer is clear.

Providing an easy way for the community to interact within the context of a topic builds interest and creates connection. Games are an obvious example, but the same principles apply to marketplaces, streaming platforms, dating apps, or any product that invites conversations between users.

But will the user show up?

Until now, brands have been reluctant to forge their own path with their own apps. It already had a huge audience on Facebook. It’s alluring, but when you look closer, in today’s reality, it doesn’t quite work out as you’d imagine. Can you grab the attention of that audience? The future of other social platforms carries the same risks.

To stand out, brands need to create authentic quality content and strong conversations that keep users coming back. That’s the hard work, and the work is the same whether the underlying technology platform is a Facebook app or a brand’s own app.

You can’t expect to build an audience just by joining Facebook. What does Facebook and other platforms really give you when you work to create a great place to talk about topics you care about? This is a question more and more brands are asking.

Is this where the conversation lingers?

An in-app community is a great way to get more people to engage with your brand and have a positive experience. In fact, they are table stakes. But other options like the Metaverse are emerging. Will they take over before the in-app community reaches its full potential?

Meta has poured billions of dollars into creating new online worlds. We are committed to building new types of communities where brands and avatars can interact in ways not yet possible on other social platforms. Brands already exist, from Wendy’s and Coca-Cola to Nike, Samsung, Gucci and Louis Vuitton. But does it work? It’s a pretty big bet.

At a recent Meta Connect event, Mark Zuckerberg said, “The metaverse needs to feel inspired.” Yes, it certainly does, but it’s the people and community that fuel it rather than the better graphics presented at the event. This is a concept that Meta has not yet fully mastered: they allow people to build the communities they want, rather than algorithms forcing them to experience.

Ultimately, community is about people, not technology. The novelty of the Metaverse will certainly draw a lot of people in, but user tastes will go back to square one as the technology that allows them to be immersed in AR/VR will soon become generally available. Will it be built into your app or brought as part of someone else’s experience?

John S. Kim is CEO of Sendbird.