Marketing 4 min read

5 Biggest Moves Facebook Just Made

Frederic Legrand COMEO | Shutterstock.com

Frederic Legrand COMEO | Shutterstock.com

Facebook isn’t slowing down. These five major moves confirm it.

Facebook still remains the biggest social media website in the world. With 2 billion monthly active users, one could argue Facebook is a planet all on its own.

However, the social media giant is not getting complacent in its dominating position and still continues to innovate and compete like a startup. It looks like it’s taken some lessons from what happened to companies that became complacent in the past.

These five latest moves by the company prove that it’s not slowing its roll anytime soon.

Here are the 5 Latest, Biggest Moves by Facebook:

1. Facebook to Launch News Subscription Service

Following the success of Instant Articles, Facebook is testing a new way (news subscription service) for publishers to monetize their content. The new service will allow publishers to hide exclusive content behind paywalls which will be accessible to readers only after subscription payments. 

The social media giant confirmed last week that it has partnered with 10 publishers to roll out this first test.

“The following partners have been integral to building this product and we look forward to learning more together as the test gets underway: Bild, The Boston Globe, The Economist, Hearst (The Houston Chronicle and The San Francisco Chronicle), La Repubblica, Le Parisien, Spiegel, The Telegraph, tronc (The Baltimore Sun, The Los Angeles Times, and The San Diego Union-Tribune), and The Washington Post.”

The service is being tested only on Android for now because of a dispute between Apple and Facebook over revenue distribution.

2. Facebook Acquires TBH

Facebook has acquired TBH, a popular anonymous teen polling app. The app rose to the number 1 spot on the app store a month ago. Overall, within just 9 weeks of launch, the app has been downloaded over 5 million times with 2.5 million people using the app daily.

Even though the amount involved in the deal wasn’t disclosed, it was TechCrunch who first broke the news believes it to be around $100M USD.

The TBH team in a blog post on their site wrote: “Today we’re announcing that we’re joining Facebook to continue our mission. When we met with Facebook, we realized that we shared many of the same core values about connecting people through positive interactions. Most of all, we were compelled by the ways they could help us realize tbh’s vision and bring it to more people.”

TBH’s acquisition is very similar to that of Instagram. Facebook has a taste for high growth, free apps which can scale to several million users and be monetized later with ads. We believe TBH fits these criteria perfectly.

3. Facebook Tests Temporary Profile Status

Facebook is testing globally a new Snapchat-styled text-only status update feature. With a character limit of 101 characters, the new status update will be much shorter than a tweet. Though the new profile status is set to self-destruct after some time, there’s an option to keep it permanently on expiry.

In an exclusive to Buzzfeed, a Facebook spokesperson said: “We’re testing an update that lets people set a temporary status on their profile to let friends know what they’re doing or feeling in the moment.

‘People have the option to set an expiration date for the status and choose whether or not it appears in News Feed or only on their profile.”

4. Facebook is Looking for Employees With National Security Clearances

As part of its efforts to prevent a future occurrence of its platform being used to aid an election rigging, the largest social media company is planning to hire people with national security clearances. The plan is to use these new employees to prevent foreign governments from interfering in any future elections.

Persons with national security clearance are able to access classified information from the U.S. government. Facebook intends to use this access to figure out potential threats which will aid the social media platform to identify malicious campaigns and take them down.

If Zuckerberg is indeed looking to run for President, as has been rumored, this is certainly a vulnerability he will have to shore up.

5. Facebook is Testing Sets, A Pinterest-like Feature

Lastly, Facebook is testing a new feature called Sets in a few countries. Similar to Pinterest boards, Sets basically lets you select multiple status updates, photos or videos, choose a theme for your collection and share them with everyone or only specified people in your friends’ list.

A Facebook spokesperson confirmed this test to Techcrunch saying: “We’re testing a way for people to create sets of specific posts, photo, and videos for just the friends that want to follow along.”

Facebook’s latest moves appear to be less coordinated. What do you think the social media giant hopes to achieve in the long-term with these moves?

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