Research On Why People Use Facebook Less
In class we learned that social media is a product whose market is affected by network effects. A typical product with network effects’ demand rises as more people use the product. Therefore, it is expected that if people don’t use Facebook that more people will leave due to the fact that others have left. However, new research shows that people are leaving Facebook for other reasons.
The majority of these users, and all to a nearly equal degree, leave Facebook due to rants/personal comments, negativity, politics, and concerns about privacy. Majority of these reasons aren’t dependent on how many people are using the social media platform; however, the 5th and 6th reason do. The 5th reason why people are leaving Facebook is because they’re enjoying other social media sites more. And the 6th reason is because their friends don’t post much anymore. There is a high chance that people are enjoying other social media sites and their friends don’t post as much simply due to the fact that other social media sites have more people on them which is the network effect. It is interesting how we can see the network effect coming into play on Facebook; however, the network effect isn’t the only reason why people decide to use/not use Facebook. Outside of the network effect there are many other factors that come into play on whether a user decides to continue to use a social media platform.
Another interesting, but smaller, reason why people decided to leave Facebook was due to the fact that parents or relatives use Facebook. This is an interesting reason to leave Facebook because we learned in class that Facebook has a network effect which means that if there are a lot of people using it then more people should want to keep using it. However, this information contradicts that statement. By the context of this data, turns out that the network effect is exclusive to people who we want to interact with on the network.