Are you upset that Facebook ‘forced’ you to download a separate Facebook Messenger app in order to communicate privately to one of your Facebook ‘friends’? All Facebook can say is to get used to it, because they plan on taking up residence on a few more places on your smartphone’s home screen. Jordan Banks, the managing director of Facebook Canada and the global head of vertical strategy says, “We’re getting away from that single app that does everything for you. We released nine different apps in 2014 and I think what you’ll see is we’ll release more in 2015 – at the demand and behest of our users.”
“At the demand and behest of our users” – really? He continues to convince us by adding that, “(Users) want single apps that do one thing incredibly well. So one of the reasons we took Messenger out of the (Facebook) app and gave it its own standalone app is because that’s what our users were telling us. They didn’t want to click two or three times before they got into Messenger”. That’s funny, because if I was in Facebook, I received a notification that someone instant messaged me and I could click to answer or join in the conversation – it all seemed a fairly smooth process to me.
Banks seems to live in a different neighborhood than I do as he vehemently insists that he has only heard good feedback about Facebook’s decision: “I hear everyone talking about how delighted they are that they get one-click access to a Messenger app that has over 500 million people using it”. Then he reminds us, “And again, the reason we’re going to this multi-app orientation isn’t because we think it’s right, we’re doing what our users tell us they want”. Yet this is a direct opposite of the loud list of complaints and one-star ratings regarding Facebook’s move when they pulled it out of Facebook.
Like it or not, Canadians are enamored with Facebook – 20 million Canadians access the site every month and 15 million on a daily basis…and although those numbers are starting to slow down, they are still on the rise. The 16 million Canadians accessing Facebook from their smartphones or tablets show a 23-percent increase from a year ago. Facebook users that access it on a daily basis using a mobile device is up 28-percent over last year, as users continue to abandon their PCs and use their mobile devices to access the internet and their favorite sites. Banks says that “You’ll see an average Canadian check their mobile device about 40 times a day and we account for one out of every four minutes spent on a mobile device in Canada. So you do that math and you say, ‘Boy, Facebook is a key cog in that mobile wheel.”‘
With those kinds of numbers, Canada has become a real hotspot for Facebook and they will continue to watch the Canadian users. Banks says that Facebook already has offices in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa and Vancouver, but intends to grow there as well. Please hit us up and like us on our Facebook Page or Google+ Page and let us know what you think of Facebook and if you were happy that they split off Facebook Messenger into a separate application…as always, we would love to hear from you.