Facebook Apps: the new Magazines?
Way back in college, I learned a great low-fidelity media planning research technique: finding out where an audience indexes highly with magazines. Magazines are so highly targeted, you can pick one up, categorize and count the editorial for the audience’s perception, and match that against the category count for advertising to understand the audience’s reality. Go ahead, try it! You’ll be surprised at how accurate a portrait this paints.
As I became more experienced in developing strategy for Websites, applications, and the like, the magazine question stayed as a part of my interview process, to learn what kinds of perceptions and realities those who were using interfaces held to gain a more complete picture of the mental models they’d be bringing to the system. It is always a funny conversation, because magazine choices are so personal. Without wavering, interviewees would offer up People, Time, and Readers’ Digest: These are safe, widely read publications.
But after prodding, the truth would come out in the form of Maxim, or Good Housekeeping, or some other magazine more niche and personal. Proving out that there is insight in these answers, people would be shocked that you even asked, as though they were revealing some dark secret.
As my focus has shifted into more social media applications and platforms, the users of these services have largely trended away from magazines, outside of titles like Parents that speak to a particlar life-stage.
Now, the moment of shock comes when I ask, “So what Facebook applications do you use?”
According to the interviewees, the socially acceptable answer is that applications are silly and extraneous. To some extent, the research bears this out, with AllFacebook reporting a 25% drop in traffic to top applications since the recent redesign.
By the same token, applications driven by such apparent sillyness like Living Social (Pick your five favorite beers, movies, etc.), and Superwall continue to draw almost 50 million monthly active users. Just as I wrote this post, I was updated that a FB friend is most like the Grease character Rizzo.
So please, don’t let anyone tell you they don’t use Facebook applications. Quite the opposite: Facebook applications are the new magazine: highly personal content that shapes how people are entering into social discourse with their peers. It’s this kind of perspective that will help brands understand (and hopefully facilitate) the ways people indulge their daily flights of fancy and build stronger ties with those that share their views.
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