Facebook is losing its appeal? Maybe it can learn two things from Ingress

According to the latest survey by Piper Jaffray, an American investment bank, as of early 2015, only 14% of American teenagers considered Facebook to be the most important social network, a 28 percentage point drop from 42% at the end of 2012.

Data shows that 32% of American teenagers think that Instagram is the most important social network; among all social networks, Snapchat (45%) has the highest proportion of young users between the ages of 18 and 24. It can be seen that more expressive forms such as pictures and videos will gradually become the mainstream of the next generation of social media; applications with certain personalized creative functions are also likely to attract the attention of young groups.

In addition, the effects of social functions in non-social applications rooted in certain scenarios, such as games, shopping, and education, should not be underestimated. Although these applications targeting special groups may not have the same number of users as pure social software, their activity and stickiness are very advantageous.

Ingress is such a mobile social game application, which has been downloaded more than 12 million times. Its content and operation mode may bring some inspiration to the current social network.

Virtual Reality: Attracting Users with Experience

Ingress is an augmented reality game, which in itself is very attractive to users.

Not only in games, virtual reality also has great application prospects in social interaction. Zuckerberg realized this problem very early, and Facebook has never stopped its layout in the field of virtual reality since it spent a huge amount of money to acquire Oculus.

In March this year, Zuckerberg posted that Facebook will support spherical videos; last week, news broke that Facebook will develop applications that support 360-degree spherical videos and plans to integrate virtual reality technology into mobile devices.

From this, it seems that Facebook has already laid the groundwork for this big move, but we don’t know when it will make its stunning debut.

O2O: Social networks can also be operated in this way

Ingress was developed by Niantic Lab (now separated from Google), which was incubated internally by Google. It started internal testing in 2012 and public testing in 2013. In addition to online and mobile promotion, Google also regularly holds offline player gatherings, which are said to attract thousands of fans each time.

Therefore, O2O is no longer just a way of playing in the e-commerce and service industries. Since games can be expanded offline, why can't the Internet? If VR pushes virtual social interaction to an extreme, then offline operations can just pull it back to the real world. The coexistence of the two can promote a more balanced development of social networks.

In addition, although it is an online game, the tasks in Ingress need to be completed offline. Players gather offline spontaneously by forming teams, which further increases the cohesion of the community.

Return to games: a special way of socializing

The introduction of location tags in social software is nothing new, especially in applications with certain special functions.

Ingress is a game based on Google Maps. The platform pushes different tasks to players based on landmarks. Players need to collect and accumulate virtual "XM" energy according to the map. The game also makes use of geographical location, and the way it plays turns users from passive information receivers to active information seekers. The degree of user initiative reflects user stickiness in a certain sense.

Therefore, video social networking may not be the whole of the next generation of social networks. Games with their own users and content and stronger interactivity may be another social model with potential.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.