With over 2,41 billion monthly active users, Facebook is perhaps the platform in which your customers spend most of their time. Actually, 1 in each 5 minutes in mobile devices are spent in Facebook , without even mentioning all other Facebook properties like Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp. While all these services are free, the truth is that we pay with our time and personal data in exchange.

Personal data such like your birth date, e-mail address, phone number, ZIP code and the whole list of all your friends, among other information, are more valuable for Facebook than any monthly subscription. In one hand, most of the users use the service because it’s free. On the other hand, when you put together the information mentioned above with your interests and behaviors, like all pages, groups and posts you’ve engaged with, and your online activity being measured by tools like the Facebook Pixel, the SDK and the Facebook Login in Mobile Apps, probably no other Internet company is able to have such a complete profile of all their users (perhaps only Amazon and Google).

That’s why you see ads of websites or apps you’ve used recently, because Facebook has access to that information. Actually, most of the people are not aware but in your profile settings you can find your ad preferences, an see some of the information related to interests related to you. Or advertisers that have included you in their campaigns.

If you’ve been an active social media user in the recent years, probably you have seen the transition from desktop platforms to mobile-only platforms. In the past, you used to access facebook.com from your browser, just like any other website. You would do it a couple of times a day, and you would engage with family and friends by commenting and liking their posts.

10 Years ago we used to access Internet, read blogs and comment in forums from browsers. There was even a huge battle between Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. Which one would be the one dominating the Internet for years to come? But a couple of years earlier, Apple and Google released the iPhone and the Android OS, forcing Internet users, years later, to access their favorite websites from their mobile phones.

Since then, platforms like Instagram, Snapchat and WhatsApp emerged. Facebook transitioned from desktop to mobile, by having separate iOS, Android and mobile versions, and this was followed by other tech companies that had to adapt their products in order to keep growing their user base. You would check twitter.com and youtube.com from desktop when you used them for the first time and years later you installed their mobile apps to keep using them when you were away from your desktop.

I created my Facebook account in 2007; I would start blogging in 2008 and I wrote my first tweet back in 2009. For that reason, I’ve been up to 10 years seeing how users interacted with social media content. Back then, there was no ads (except in Google Search results with Google Adwords).

For ages, everything we saw in social media was not promoted content. Even when Facebook released Facebook Ads in 2007, it took a couple of years for marketers and brands to understand how they could target their audience and how to deliver branded content. Social Media Managers and Community Managers had to find out how to set up their first Facebook Pages, Twitter accounts and YouTube channels, among others. The first step was to create a brand persona and start reaching their audience by creating content. Continue reading →