Facebook Home: The next step in allowing social networking sites to enter our lives

During a time where waves of new technological advances are occurring, Facebook have introduced a new ‘mobile-ad real estate’ by creating a Facebook ‘home screen’ for the background of people’s smartphones, (Delo and McDermott, 2013).

The CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg explained the app as being much deeper than any other. The new app will be available from April 12 through ‘Google Play’ for several Android phones including the HTC and Samsung Galaxy S III. The app allows consumers to see the ‘ever-changing rotation of visual content’ from their usual live feed whilst using their phone in the background; this is called the “cover feed” which would show on their home screens (as a wallpaper-like feed) and lock screens- where the advent of advertisements will also lay. Facebook Home's other fundamental functionality is to allow people to message their Facebook friends, whose profile photos will show up as small "chat heads," while doing any other usual task on their phones, (Delo and McDermott, 2013).

eMarketer (2013) suggests that Facebook will need to unlock a substantial revenue opportunity to claim to the advertising space, in an attempt to convince Android phone-users to begin to think totally differently about the way in which they use their phone and allow Facebook to almost take over their lives; (people that use Android phones make up 43.5% of the U.S. smartphone market).

The first marketing campaign for this app has been produced by the Advertising agency Wieden & Kennedy. The television advertisement is currently being broadcasted and the campaign will also use Facebook ad products like mobile news-feed ads and log-out ads, but no other paid digital marketing.

“The marketing investment is explained by Facebook's desire to accelerate its already fast-growing mobile-ad revenue, which eMarketer expects to reach $1.53 billion this year, up from $470.7 million in 2012. It's also possible that the feature, if widely adopted, could one day furnish a rich stream of data about users' app activity for ad targeting.”

 

As mentioned before, Facebook has now started running the advertisement called "Airplane". The advertisement shows a man on a plane meeting people (and pets) from his Facebook friends' photos which shows the deeply rooted level of integration the app gives. “It had more than 64,000 likes on Facebook by late Sunday morning,” but the advertisement itself has procreated a wealth of damaging comments. Some of the comments are shown below:

"I don't even understand what they are trying to show us," one Facebook user wrote. "It makes no sense to me. If I get a Facebook phone is my life going to be like a circus with that annoying tuba sound following me around?”

It has been often argued that social networking sites have almost taken over people’s lives by a large number of users said to be checking their Facebook feed over 14 times a day. This app would not help this cause as it would distract employees and students even more if they then can see their Facebook updates even when they have locked their phone.

It has been stated that Facebook also have plans to use the Facebook Home app to put advertisements on people’s phone home screens. This would cause a complete invasion into people’s lives if companies are then allowed to advertise directly to people’s phones even when they aren’t being used. Mark Zuckerberg has stated that the Home app will allow users to flick through their Facebook feed without ‘jumping through hoops’. Apart from the slight convenience of not having to tap the screen once to go onto Facebook, the main benefits of this app have not yet become evident.