The largest social network is now bringing these games back to its Messenger and mobile app.
Facebook mobile games are on their way, says the company. The goal is to help to replicate the type of success they have seen on Facebook.com. According to the social network, 15% of the time spent on the website is from users playing games.
However, until now, those mobile games were not available on the Facebook mobile app.
Despite the fact that the majority of its users spend most of their time on the app, it didn’t include Facebook mobile games. Instead, the social network encouraged people to use Google Play or the App Store to download the games. They could not be played within Facebook’s mobile app itself.
It is precisely that limitation that will soon be changing. The company announced that it is rolling out Instant Games. This feature makes it possible for Facebook users to play some of their favorite mobile games inside Facebook Messenger and the main Facebook app.
Some of the Facebook mobile games that will be available include Words with Friends and Pac-Man.
This isn’t the first time the king of social media platforms has chosen to host content within itself. Previous efforts have included advertising and web articles among other things. The goal of this strategy is to ensure that users remain within the Facebook mobile apps for as long as possible. Hosting the content instead of sending users elsewhere is an important step in keeping them on the platform.
After all, if users can play mobile games while still in Facebook – where they already were – then why would they leave that app in order to use a different one?
This also presents a considerable mobile marketing opportunity for game app developers. The reason is that Facebook has a massive reach. Therefore, it can place a mobile game in front of a larger number of potential players. Moreover, because users can simply start playing as they don’t need to leave Facebook to download it. Eliminating that additional step can make it far easier to encourage users to give the game a try.
With 1.8 billion users, it is more than likely that Facebook mobile games will have quite the draw for developers and users alike.
The creator of the social network is working hard to fight growing accusations of its role in the election results.
Amidst a rapidly rising body of criticism against Facebook social media marketing, Mark Zuckerberg insists the network isn’t to blame for Donald Trump’s victory. Critics claim that viral fake pro-Trump news stories on Facebook led to the Republican’s election win.
Zuckerberg has responded quite forcefully, saying that he feels the accusation is a “pretty crazy idea.”
Speaking onstage at a recent conference, Zuckerberg addressed the thought that Facebook social media marketing contributed to Donald Trump’s election. “Personally,” he said, “I think the idea that fake news on Facebook, which is a very small amount of the content, influenced the election in any way—I think is a pretty crazy idea. Voters make decisions based on their lived experience.”
Zuckerberg also went on to ask “Why would you think there would be fake news on one side and not the other?”
That has not assuaged the critics insisting Facebook social media marketing doesn’t properly filter fake news.
Many claim that as the largest social media platform worldwide, viral hoax news posts shared there may have helped Trump to win. The reason, say many, is that Facebook either refuses or is not able to contain the spread of those fake news articles.
Moreover, BuzzFeed News conducted an investigation earlier in 2016 which examined the most right-wing extremely partisan publications published by Facebook pages. They determined that 38 percent of the news shared by those sources was misinformation. That said, when examining the same type of page on the left-wing side, misinformation occurred considerably less: 20 percent of the time.
Those figures may not sound too problematic, but BuzzFeed News also identified another trend with this form of Facebook social media marketing. The stories with the lowest accuracy were the ones BuzzFeed found to generate the largest number of shares and reactions (such as Likes). Inaccurate stories on Facebook pages greatly outperformed publications shared on Facebook pages from more mainstream political news sites. Over the last few months, a rash of hoax news sites were created in order to take advantage of this trend.
