Is Facebook's New Community Messaging Feature any Good? EP23

Episode 23 Transcript

Welcome back to the Marketing Combat Podcast. My name is Chris Kubbernus and with me today, as always, the incredible, exciting, thrilling, bombastic Jason Donnelly. What's up, man? Call me Shaggy. You're getting me started. Am I too old? I'm not fun. Tell us. you that reference? Okay, great. Some people did. The over 40 crowd got it for sure. All right.

So both of you listening, if either of you are over 40, you might know that Shaggy reference. But today on the Marketing Combat Podcast, what we do every day that we have these quick debates is we know the topic that we're gonna talk about in marketing, in advertising, in social, across the board, in entertainment, and one of us decides what we're gonna fight for and the other.

has to fight it. If they like it or not, devil's advocate. today we are asking the question is the messenger's new feature, the community feature, is it a good thing? Is it a great thing? Or is it the worst group text ever? Personally, there's already enough group texts out there. There's discord, there's telegram, there's I basically read it. There's I mean, Twitter.

All of it is the same thing. And I don't, I know, I know. But I don't think we need another one, especially in chat. Chat to me is like a safe place to talk to my mom, my friends, stuff like that. Not a place where I go to talk to 5 ,000 people that you're allowed to have in these texts.

And it's just going to be notification after notification after notification. And we're already getting too many notifications these days. I don't think that adding a massive community feature to Messenger is going to do anything for the platform, for the world. We already have enough of these community places. And I see Chris dancing. I feel like he's going to be happy about this. So Chris, tell me why a community feature in Messenger, which is already its own community, is a good thing.

I'll tell you why it's a good thing. Listen, you're right. We've got a lot of apps that do this. Telegram is good when you mention WhatsApp has a group feature. I would say Discord is that as well. You've also seen Slack groups. So these group messaging platforms features have been around for a while. And it's actually been a little bit on Facebook because you could do it as like a Facebook group and then you could group message everybody.

It hasn't been disconnected in a sense that you just had a messenger group chat with about 5 ,000 people. If you want to go that high, right? We've seen it attached to a page and you've seen it like...

So now it's getting kind of cut off from that. You could have it as just a group text sort of thing. And the why I think it's really good is because yes, we've had these other things, but a lot of the older crowd, the ones that would get that Shaggy reference at the front, they're not necessarily on Discord. And they're not necessarily using Telegram or WhatsApp. So we've got an older crowd that hasn't necessarily been in these sort of groups. And now introducing this to Facebook, I think it gives an opportunity for that crowd to get into that.

I also think like messenger is used a lot by the now bat. was the old crowd that messenger is actually quite used by the younger audience. Right. So you'll see that young people don't like Facebook. They don't go on Facebook. They would never go to Facebook groups, but they use messenger a lot. Right. So Facebook is very smart, very tact, very strategic on this side because they're saying, okay, we've got an issue here. Nobody goes on Facebook or the young crowd and we want them using our products. Let's open up this group thing.

this group community chat thing, which is what lot of young people are doing on Discord and other places anyway. And let's introduce it here because we want that, you know, we want that interaction. We want that ability. So I think that's going to be exciting. think a lot of people will be involved in, in group chats towards, you know, all of their different things that they love to do. could also be large group chat for

community -based initiatives, philanthropic things within the community. I think it's going to be great for people who want to join like gamer groups or, you know, they want to talk about a latest show. We've also seen like a lot of discussion about a specific show that people are watching if they're really big into, is Real Housewives still a thing? Now I'm dating myself. Is Real Housewives or...

Yeah, a group. Yeah, we need, where's the group chat about Lost, you guys? Have you seen the latest episode? It's crazy. Sorry, spoiler alert for anybody. I feel like they're dead, but the showrunners, they said they're not dead, so how can, they wouldn't lie to us, would they? Anyway, that's a throwback. So.

I think there's a lot of opportunity there, I think, both for the young crowd and also the old crowd, like I said, who doesn't get into Discord, doesn't get into telegram groups. They're going to find more interaction and more community, right? Which is what we really think about when we think about Facebook. We think about community, we think about closeness, we think about talking to people that are like -minded like us. Whereas Twitter, TikTok, these are entertainment platforms. They're not really great for...

for connection. I think that's, I think it's a great thing and I'm looking forward to seeing how it plays out for Facebook because I think it'll be really good. I think also what they're looking for is maybe a little bit more outside of the DMs, like outside of, because they'll be able to use that group chat data to train AIs and things like that. So I think Facebook is looking at it as like, if we can get more people into group chats, that's more like...

an open place for data mining. So we're going to use that to understand, you know, stuff and sell that data to Netflix and Disney and stuff like that. So I think it's a smart play from Facebook. All right. thing. we're talking about LinkedIn videos coming over. So I think this is just another case of

all the platforms doing all the things that all the other ones do. They see something and they're like, I'll put it online. LinkedIn's doing it with video. Messenger's doing it with Telegram and Discord. They're all doing the same things that everybody else is gonna do. So they're all eventually gonna be the same platform. And that to me is just a waste. Instagram used to be an incredible photography platform.

Like specific, you would put your pictures out, your day, like the things that you're doing, and now it's moved into everything else. It's just, they're all gonna be one platform. That's the only thing that's really, really bothering me about this. It's a great idea, but it's already been done. That's it, good point. We'll leave the show on that. Is this just old hat or is it new hat? Let us know in the comments. I know this is a podcast, so I mean, if you're watching on YouTube, you can leave comments if you just...

you're listening, leave us a review. This helps us grow the show and gets it out to more people like you that enjoy content like this, that want to hear healthy, well thought out debates about specific topics in marketing. And so if you could leave us a review, tell us how we're doing and that'll be good. So thank you so much for joining. Until next time, I've been Chris Kubbernus. And I'm Spike Jones.