Facebook goes back to school
I started my Freshman year of college in the fall of 2004, when the most common way to keep in touch with people over the Internet was through AOL Instant Messenger and MySpace. I remember being in class one day when one of my peers mentioned something called “The Facebook,” a social network exclusive to college students. In fact, you had to have a university email address just to sign up.
There were no parents creepily following our college lives through status updates and photo albums, no Facebook pages dedicated to Internet memes, no Open Graph connecting Facebook users to the rest of the web. And despite the apparent drama that ensued amongst Mark Zuckerberg and his colleagues when Facebook launched, the social network was simple and straightforward for the college students who used it.
Fast forward six years later, and Facebook is a social networking giant with more than 500 million active users and nothing simple and straightforward about it anymore. But as much as Facebook pisses me off, I couldn’t help but feel a ping of nostalgia when I read about Universities on Facebook, the network’s recently launched homage to college students.
According to the Universities on Facebook page, which currently has over 5,000 likes, its purpose is to “help university students establish an interactive presence on Facebook by engaging with their campus community.” The Universities page has a few key features.
- Community. Suggestions for using Facebook Pages to connect with your dorm, publicize your club or group, and make classes social.
- Press. Tips and best practices for University newspapers to keep students informed and make newspapers social.
- Student Government. Ideas for how to connect with students and be social online.
- Sports. Ways to get connected and make sports social.
- Deals. Discounts and special offers for students from popular back-to-school brands such as Utrecht Art, Eddie Bauer, and Newegg.com.
With a significant percentage of 18-25 year olds experiencing Facebook fatigue, this is a smart move in the right direction for Facebook. Although part of its impressive growth can be attributed to Baby Boomers’ and seniors’ accelerated adoption of social networks, Facebook is struggling to keep its younger users engaged. Of the 19% of teenagers who are leaving Facebook, “16% are leaving because their parents are there and 14% say there are too many adults and older people.”
New websites such as CollegeOnly and Scoop are addressing these concerns, creating social networks limited to college students with a .edu email address. And though it’s unlikely that either of these will steal Facebook’s thunder, the pressure is on now more than ever for the network to retain its college-aged audience.
Universities for Facebook is an interesting concept, and students will likely be drawn to the coupons and discounts featured in the Deals section, but for the digital natives who are currently in college, I can’t help but wonder if the rest of the features on the page will offer any information or advice that they don’t already know or can’t easily find with a quick Google search. It may not be going anywhere anytime soon, but if Facebook wants to re-engage its younger users and improve its deflating statistics, it’s going to need to try harder than this.
If you’re a current college student, what do you think about Universities for Facebook?
Jessica,
Great post! If Facebook wants to engage with and retain its college audience, it will have to work much harder than creating a page that has information that most of us already know and deals that we don’t really want, who buys condoms and laundry detergents online? Seriously! Facebook should find a way to curate information on events, classes, etc. specific to each school in real time, although that might create even more privacy issues. Or something else that is available only to college students.
If I was going to school now, I would have no reason to use Facebook. It provides very little value. And that is the difference between Facebook now and Facebook 5 years ago: the value that it used to provide specifically to college students.
Addy,
You make some great points, and I like your ideas about Facebook curating information relevant to college students.
I think one thing that Facebook has obviously struggled with over the past several years is evolving its business model in a way that would make them most profitable without alienating some of its early users. Since millenials are tech-savvy, we are conscious of our privacy (or lack thereof, in this case), so Facebook’s changing business model no longer lends itself to what we want from a social network.
But alas, all our friends are there and will probably continue to be there until something better comes along, so I imagine that even if we start using it less, we’ll still rely on it to keep in touch and stay connected…for better or worse.