Facebook Life Cycle

 

All those who have done MBA in Marketing know about Product Life Cycle. This concept says that a product goes through 4 stages – Introduction, Growth, Maturity and Decline.

As name says, Introduction is the stage where product is introduced, then comes growth stage, where product increases sales/market share, then comes a time when product reaches at a level where it becomes difficult to grow more or maintain interest of its customers in the product and then start a decline.

I am using facebook from past 2.5 years regularly and saw many people joining in between. I was just analyzing the status messages / behaviour of people including me on facebook. I found that at facebook also these 4 stages of life cycle apply. But it is not for facebook, this applies on the users of facebook. A facebook user also goes through these 4 stages. How??? Okay, let me explain stage by stage… 

Introduction:

A person is introduced to facebook by some of friend usually. Initially he will log in once in a day and see what is happening. He tries to understand, read status messages, comments, but don’t comment or like. He does nothing, just watch.

If his friend is very active, he might ask him “abbey kitna faltu hai tu”, “abbey kuch bhi likhta rehta hai”. I also said same to my friends, and now many friends say the same to me.

Mostly to such questions he will get a reply – use it, you will also enjoy. With the time the person starts with commenting on the status of his friend, and then starts writing his status updates. And most of the time he will like his status update himself. Most of the people write following type of status updates initially–

-         Feeling bored…

-         Going home. Feeling happy.

-         Mummy ne paranthe banaye hai.. yummy..

-         Zindagi me kisi par bharosa mat karo..

Not many people comment on his status messages because he doesn’t have many friends on facebook. And most people who comment are also new like him, and rest feel bored with such status updates.

Growth:

This person will start adding new friends and next status update will be “from 50 friends to 172 friends in just 2 months .” He will also add unknown people, he will also add those who replied to his comment on his friends status message. He will also add those unknown people who comment most on his friends status update.

You can also see the growth stage in his status updates. Now he will not write much about feeling bore types updates. Now he will do following:

-         A joke

-         Share something interesting he saw

-         Share photographs

-         Write about movies  like : singham fantastic movie..

-         Start using other features like poke and tagging..

One more change, now he will check facebook several times and install facebook application on mobile.

Maturity

Now you can see more variety in his status message and comments. Now his comments will be more than LOL, ROFL etc.. He will also share concern about issues, he will share related links and videos. Till this time he knows his friends well so the kind jokes he will share will be different. He will not like unnecessary tagging, he will stop accepting unknown friend request. In fact he will delete unwanted contacts also. He will change privacy setting of fb. He will make groups and share status updates with certain groups. He will hide certain information on his profile.

Decline

Now because the person tried maximum of the things on fb, so his status updates become monotonous. No. of comments will start decreasing on his status updates. Daily update will go down and person will start updating weekly.

One day he realizes that same kind of activities are happening on fb. Nothing is interesting. He start feeling that facebook is bore.

And this way again he reach back to day 1 stage where he log in once in a day, he will check whats happening and log out again.

P.S. – You must be thinking that each product will decline/die after maturity stage. Answer is yes, but not for all products. Job of a marketing / brand /product manager is to identify maturity stage and do some innovations and change the product. Even in FB you need to experiment / change after reaching maturity stage to maintain the interest.

Next time i will tell you categories of people on facebook.