Over a decade after dropping out of Harvard Mark Zuckerberg returned to Cambridge, Massachusetts to give the Commencement Address to the Class of 2017.While May is college graduation season and most commencement speakers are older and not in tune with today's millennials, Harvard's was different. What do you expect they are Harvard. They are always different. However the thing that made them different was that Mark Zuckerberg is one of them. Zuckerberg is a millennial and he made an effort to point that out.
The issue with millennials that most past generations don't understand is that they desperately want to make a difference. But they don't truly know how which in turn makes previous generations call them lazy, entitled or any other nonvenomous adjective. That's way Zuckerberg's speech directed the recent Harvard grads at finding a purpose and bringing people together. Which is exactly what he did with Facebook.
Now this entire blog is not going to be directed at Zuckerberg and his 2017 Harvard University commencement address but his company as a whole. Quite a shocker. Yes this is going to be about Facebook.
With Facebook, Zuckerberg created the social media world we now live in. Yes there were social media sites before Facebook like MySpace and Friendster both became overshadowed when Zuckerberg started Facebook and continued to pour all of his energy into it that forced him to drop out of the Cambridge university.
Just like Facebook was the it thing in the early part of the decade, the fear was there that it too was going to be overshadowed by another form of social media. But that hasn't happened. Facebook is still as big today - if not bigger - than it was back in 2004 when Zuckerberg first launched the site.
Facebook survived the creation of a quick-hit, instantaneous news social feed in 2006 (Twitter). They scooped up a photo-based social media site in 2012 (Instagram). It doesn't appear as if Snapchat is making any big moves to overshadow the big blue "F." Facebook is truly the social media giant.
They are constantly staying one-step ahead of their competition. Google owns the rights to YouTube but Facebook has created their own streaming service with the advent of FacebookLive. (On a side note, the only thing that may be bigger than Facebook is Google and only by a slim margin.)
FacebookLive has been bigger than YouTube for many athletic organizations that stream their athletic events. In addition to pushing out their stream through their own streaming service (StretchInternet, PackNetwork, Boxcast), athletic organizations are also using FacebookLive to push out their brand. It also serves another purpose, they are getting people to tune into the broadcast that maybe wouldn't ordinarily watch because it's popping up on their news feed. Smart tactic.
Facebook is not dying. In some senses they are like the Apple of the social media world. Continuing to grow and evolve.
If there is one social media site that is fading it would be Twitter. Twitter has become more of a marketing social media tool for quick news updates. The younger generation may have Twitter accounts but they are favoring the photo social media sites like Instagram and Snapchat. Parents may also have Twitter accounts but they use Facebook with more regularity to keep an eye on the kids who have Facebook accounts of their own.
Facebook is showing no signs of going away anytime soon. And now I'm going to go publish this to Facebook - see you can't escape it!
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