Facebook has announced that they will abandon third-party competition apps to run competitions and instead offer users the chance to run promotions themselves. The update should make page promotions marketer and competition entrant friendly. By having competitions run directly on their Page Timelines companies will be able to collate “likes”, “shares” and “comments”, making replying and data collecting effortless. For those of you wanting to win BIG prizes one of the main benefits of this update is that you will have a chance to win more BIG prizes and those promotions you “like” will not be posted on personal timelines, reducing the amount of spam.
On the surface the update looks great, everyone’s a winner, but we may forget that a relatively simple Facebook update has massive repercussions on others, and in this case the third-party app creators. Creators, SocailCubix and North Social, just to name a couple, have provided brands and businesses with competition app templates and have made businesses of their own out of this technology. The Facebook update pushes to either search for new ways of creating revenue or hope that loyal users will continue using their service instead of the Facebook service, something that is unlikely.
Social media updates are fantastic for users, and networks tend to want to make these easier or more appealing, but we often forget what happens behind the scenes. This shows us how volatile the tech industry is, one day you’re on top of the world, the next you can be out of business! The major players in the industry – Facebook, Google and Twitter – seem to hold all the cards and as soon as they decide to make a simple change then hundreds of companies could be “killed” off.
© Dan DeChiaro “Walking Away ” Photo. Attribution 2.0 Generic
