You may have seen your Facebook friends posting videos looking back at the ‘best bits’ of their online lives, this was to celebrate Facebook turning 10 years old this year. It’s hard to believe that something that started out as a forum for Harvard students to chat to each other 10 years ago is now worth over $130 billion dollars and has more than 1.2 billion active users per month.
The story of Facebook has been a dramatic rise over the decade and shows no signs of slowing down globally. In the UK however the growth has stopped with current user figures at 31 million, down 1.5 million compared to 2012. The shift has been attributed to Facebook being seen as mainstream and no longer cool for the younger generation, a change that occurred for many the day they received a friend request from parents or even grandparents. This reduction is by no way going to result in the demise of Facebook though, with half of the UK population still spending an average of seven hours per month on the site which, when totalled, means one in every five minutes on the internet is spent on Facebook.
This avenue still presents an online market which is very appealing to clients with recommendations on Facebook accounting for 16 per cent of users buying a product, 23 per cent trying a new restaurant and 36 per cent listening to a new band, all based on recommendations.
In the UK advertisers spent £333 million on Facebook advertising last year, in MEC Manchester we saw investment rise in Facebook rise 200 per cent year on year which reflects the growing importance of getting your pages seen by a huge and targeted audience
In 2004 there was no Twitter and Instagram, The X Factor and Strictly had just finished their first series’ and advertising spend in the UK was higher overall than it is today. The media landscape was a hugely different place, in 2004 the total spent on advertising in the UK was £16.9 billion pounds compared to £14 billion spent in 2013, whilst there was less spent in total, the percentage shift between media has been dramatic.