Facebook Really Wants You to Come Back

It’s been about a year since Rishi Gorantala deleted the Facebook app from his phone, and the company has only gotten more aggressive in its emails to win him back. The social network started out by alerting him every few days about friends that had posted photos or made comments—each time inviting him to click a link and view the activity on Facebook. He rarely did.

Then, about once a week in September, he started to get prompts from a Facebook security customer-service address. “It looks like you’re having trouble logging into Facebook,” the emails would say. “Just click the button below and we’ll log you in. If you weren’t trying to log in, let us know.” He wasn’t trying. But he doesn’t think anybody else was, either.

“The content of mail they send is essentially trying to trick you,” said Gorantala, 35, who lives in Chile. “Like someone tried to access my account so I should go and log in.”

Facebook, which has more than 2 billion people logging in monthly, has never failed to grow its user base. To beat investors’ expectations consistently on user numbers, it’s just as important for the company to retain people like Gorantala as it is to recruit new members. People who are logging into Facebook less often—but aren’t fully disconnected—are noticing more and more frequent prompts to come back, sometimes multiple times a day, via emails or text messages reminding them what they’re missing out on, according to screenshots and reports from users around the world. Gorantala, who eased off his Facebook usage because of privacy concerns, said his security prompt comes “whenever I don’t log in for a few days.”

Even with regular users, Facebook has become thirstier for posts. The social network’s reminder boxes at the top of the news feed, which often show memories or anniversaries of friendship with close pals, have recently become real estate for more trivial milestones—like being tagged in 10 photos with someone or getting 100 heart reactions.

Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said earlier this year that Facebook was going to rethink the formula for its news feed to put an emphasis on posts from friends and family, downplaying content from brands and media. The company will emphasize “time well spent,” aiming for meaningful interactions that will be better for users long-term. It cautioned that the changes could cause some measures of engagement to go down, because people may spend less time on the app reading articles and watching videos.

But engagement may have been a concern for Zuckerberg before the announcement. While the company has said it sees positive trends, it hasn’t updated a statistic on how much time people spend on its properties since the first quarter of 2016. Minutes spent on the site in the U.S. are declining, according to measurements by both Nielsen and Comscore, even if the trend is healthy globally. In the third quarter, the growth in daily users was the slowest ever.

“You could argue that the actions they announced were in response to what they were observing,” said Brian Wieser, an analyst at Pivotal Research. “Given how big they are, you’re going to run into a wall at some point.”