driving users AWAY from the product is not the intended result 1 comment
Over the past year, popular social networking sites Twitter and Facebook have both undergone changes. Twitter increased their security and made the site a little more user-friendly in terms of finding things, and even now they’re working on improving their search feature. Facebook is in the throes of an extremely unpopular change to users’ pages — their “what are my friends doing” pages, not their profile pages — after taking a major hit a few months back when they simply shifted stuff around without really changing the functionality.
The point of a website, when you get right down to it, is to provide compelling content so advertisers’ ads show up on the page and people (maybe) click on them*. Facebook has very non-intrusive ads on their site, and Twitter doesn’t have any (at the moment).
Now, I’m a power internet user — as most of my colleagues at 11Alive will attest. Instead of going to Facebook.com and Twitter.com whenever I want to know what’s going on with my friends, I go instead to my RSS application, Google Reader, and open a folder that has all of my friends’ status updates in both Twitter and Facebook.
At least, it used to. But in a single day, both Twitter and Facebook have made changes to their sites that prevent me from doing it this way. From a business standpoint, this makes perfect sense — now I actually have to go to Facebook’s site or Twitter’s site to see what’s going on.
Or do I?
Facebook and Twitter both make a big deal out of the fact that they’re great for people on the go — you can update your status and upload your pictures from your mobile phone with relative ease. I do it all the time. And, unlike their on-the-internet counterparts, the Facebook Mobile App and the TwitterFon app for iPhone have not changed their interfaces at all since I downloaded them.
So instead of going to Facebook.com, I’ll hit the little blue-and-white “F” on my phone to see what’s going on on Facebook. Instead of going to Twitter.com, I’ll hit the little blue-and-white “t” on my phone to read and reply to my friends’ tweets**. I won’t see any Facebook ads, and as for TwitterFon… well, that’s free to begin with, but it’s such a useful app to me that I’d probably pay the programmer 99 cents if he started charging.
There are a lot of ways to consume web content — going to sites, reading or watching video on your phone, aggregating everything into an RSS reader (my preferred method). But no matter what, companies should never do anything that makes their web-based consumers go somewhere where ads can’t be seen. Facebook? Twitter? You just pulled that off marvelously.
* Don’t lie. You know you’ve clicked on a few ads this month. We all do it.
** A “tweet” is a status message on Twitter, like “Josh is posting a blog on 11AliveBlogs.com”.
