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After growing to become the largest and most powerful social media conglomerate on the planet, Facebook (NASDAQ: FB) now it seeks to return to its humble beginnings. When CEO Mark Zuckerberg created the site in 2004, the platform quickly became a social network exclusively for college students before opening its virtual doors to the general public in 2006.
Time to go back to school.
Image source: Facebook.
Back to school season
This week, Facebook introduced Facebook Campus, a new section dedicated exclusively to the university designed to connect with classmates. Now that many students are returning to their universities in extraordinary circumstances due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Facebook says it wants to help students build and maintain connections, a process that is fundamentally more challenging due to social distancing guidelines.
The Facebook campus will reside in the main Facebook application for students and users will have a specific campus profile that will include optional information such as their major and year of graduation. The campus will be somewhat segregated from the main platform, and the shared posts will only be visible to other users on the campus.
Mobile app researcher Jane Manchun Wong, who searches the code for clues as to what the major tech companies are working on, discovered Campus earlier this year.
Facebook is working on “Campus”, a new exclusive space for university students
There will be Groups, Events, etc. for “Campus” spaces pic.twitter.com/cfEwubLxTt
– Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) April 9, 2020
Campus will have a dedicated news section that only displays information that is relevant to the specific university and there will be tools that will allow students to organize events such as study groups. Students can search their university directories to find peers who may have shared interests, and there will be a new messaging service called Campus Chats, as if Facebook doesn’t already have its hands full trying to unite all of its existing messaging platforms as part. of Zuckerberg’s great unified messaging plan.
The company is already beginning to implement the Facebook Campus to select colleges and universities across the country.
Staying in the ecosystem
It’s unclear if Facebook plans to monetize Campus directly, with ads, or otherwise, but the company is proactively highlighting the privacy controls available within the new section. Facebook recognizes that a user’s activity on campus can and will be used for advertising targeting purposes. The company suggests that ads can be displayed within the Campus, noting that “your activity on Facebook may influence what you see on Campus, and your activity on Campus may influence what you see elsewhere on Facebook.”
Even if no ads are shown directly on Campus, the new service is a clear game of engagement aimed at keeping users in the Facebook family of apps, where there is no shortage of monetization opportunities.
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