Social Media Marketing Blog

Is there anything Facebook can’t do? The network that once had control in Australia and New Zealand for a while has now been placed firmly on the chopping block. The Age Reports that it is basically because of dwindling MySpace users and rapid acceleration of Facebook memberships. What I want to examine is though why Bebo did not succeed.

I actually was an active Bebo user for quite a few months a couple of years ago, when it was first launched in Australia. It was my network of choice for a few reasons:

• It was clean and easy to use - compared to MySpace at the time which frustrated me to no end due to the visual abominations that were MySpace page customisations. Bebo made it easy for everyone with a fixed template suggestion.
• All my friends were on it - Since many of my friends believed in the same benefits listed above, they flocked in droves and hence we were commenting and swapping photos all over the place.
• Good privacy settings - The customisable settings that were featured was a much better fit for my security needs, then MySpaces’s all-or-nothing approach.

So with all these good features, why did everything go so wrong? Well Facebook gained traction, twitter started to move on board, and there was also new networks springing up all over the place with very similar feature sets - trying to jump in and cash in on the fad.

And that’s where I think Bebo’s strategy feel down - they started to play Mr Me Too.

• Trying to do music - I remember logging in one day and noticing that everyone was becoming friends of bands and so forth, clamouring to get their attention.
• Trying to be YouTube - You then started to embed and share videos that you uploaded, something YouTube really has had on lock for a while.
• Poor Monetisation - the next thing the network is filled with banner ads, flashing gifs and other irrelevant information - when all I was trying to do was check out my friends photos from the weekend.
• No API - When Facebook released their API, that is really when things started going crazy and the developers spurred on users by offering them something to do when their friends were not online.

So by being a jack of all trades and master of none, I believe they really should have focused on doing one thing, and doing it well. If only Twitter was gaining traction, they would have learnt from their example and let the user’s define the functionality.

So thanks for the memories Bebo.