Facebook, the company behind the social media platform also called Facebook, wants to avoid being confused with Facebook - but instead of changing its name, like Google did to Alphabet, it is changing its logo.

The new logo is still just the word Facebook, but it is capitalised where the social media platform's logo is in lowercase.

An animated image released by the company shows the logo in various colours, distancing it a little from the blue of the main Facebook platform - which the company is increasingly describing as an app.

This is the new Facebook logo, which is meant to help you avoid confusing Facebook for Facebook. pic.twitter.com/34gpXY42Ca — Alexander J. Martin (@AJMartinSky) November 5, 2019

Image: How the branding will appear on Facebook-owned apps

Explaining the change, the company's chief marketing officer, Antonio Lucio, said "Facebook started as a single app", although in truth Facebook started as a social networking website for Harvard students - not a single application.

But, as Mr Lucio continued: "Now, 15 years later, we offer a suite of products that help people connect to their friends and family, find communities and grow businesses."


This range of products all under the Facebook umbrella has grown increasingly diverse. They include the major four platforms, Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp, as well as others which have a much smaller market share or are yet to launch.

Oculus, Workplace, Portal and Calibra are mentioned by Mr Lucio as sharing infrastructure as well as development teams - and the company is keen to avow that these are Facebook products.

For a company such as Google, the value of its Search brand benefits its other services, including Maps and Gmail - and they are available as interconnected services at the point of delivery.

Image: Where the logo will appear on WhatsApp

However, for Facebook, which has expanded primarily by acquiring these other social media platforms which were foreign to its own development teams, the focus has been on assimilating those platforms and their users into its own business structures.

For a long time there was very little clarity about how the company would do this and if it could do so legally.

Earlier this year the company's executives were called in for an "urgent briefing" by the Irish data protection commissioner after confirming plans to integrate the Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram platforms.

Those plans would see the company combine its data collection on the hundreds of millions of users of its separate platforms around the world - potentially bringing it into conflict with strict EU laws on how companies handle personal data.

Facebook's information campaign around its new branding would potentially increase its ability to argue that users had provided their informed consent to continue using these joined-up platforms.

"We started being clearer about the products and services that are part of Facebook years ago, adding a company endorsement to products like Oculus, Workplace and Portal," explained Mr Lucio.

"And in June we began including 'from Facebook' within all our apps. Over the coming weeks, we will start using the new brand within our products and marketing materials, including a new company website."

Whether such signalling will be enough to address concerns about the company's market share remains to be seen.