Facebook gone, First-party data up

In 2008, a bug knocked Facebook offline for nearly a whole day, affecting 80 million users, according to CNBC, which also reported an hourlong outage later in 2019.

History tends to repeat itself way too often. Approx. 2.75 billion people facing the worst nightmare who rely on social media platforms to communicate and do business. On Monday, Facebook went offline for more than 5 hours, which marked the longest stretch of downtime in a long time ever. Along with that, its core platforms; Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger also went down.

Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s chief technology officer, tweeted:

“Sincere apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook-powered services right now,” Schroepfer wrote. “We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible.”

The recent event surely showcased how dependent billions of people are on a company under the intense spotlight. More than 3.5 billion people use Facebook and its core platforms to connect with friends and family or for advertisement. A day earlier the outage, the former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen unmasked herself behind the leaked documents. She handed over internal research papers to news media and lawmakers revealing that Facebook was aware of the harms that its core platforms were causing.

In her testimony, she wrote: Facebook consistently resolved those conflicts in favor of its profits. The result has been a system that amplifies division, extremism, and polarization — and undermining societies around the world.” Haugen also claimed that the giant platform was misleading its investors by misrepresenting the information.

In April 2021, Facebook exposed personal data including the name, phone number, and address of over 533 million Facebook users. In 2020 Facebook stated, 10 million active advertisers were using the social networking platform to promote their products and services. Sadly, the platform billions of people depend on is neither as secure nor reliable as they assumed it to be. With this growing concern, brands and advertisers are shifting from third-party data to building first-party data strategies.

At Hashbrown Systems we have been studying these trends for over a decade and our recommendation is the same as every time.

1. Employ a first-party data strategy
2. A Better understanding of customers

For years, marketers have been investing in third-party data to target the right audience and brand promotion. Though third-party data is collected without the consent of users from various websites, social channels, or platforms. Using this data marketers are targeting the anonymous audience which results in the mistargeted audience and lost expenses.

On the other hand, first-party data is as simple and feasible as it sounds. Brands collect information directly from consumers for analysis personalize experiences and drive new customers as well sales.

With our strong in-house Data Analytics & Management team we can design a stunningly effective and quick to deploy First Part Data Strategy. This is here to stay and is very much the future of excellent consumer-brand relationships.