Facebook Marketing Analysis - Essay Example

The target market includes those youngsters who wish to keep connected with their folks and friends all over the world. Their attributes relating to values, attitudes, interests, personality, or lifestyles matter to them. Facebook's new exciting offers target market users who want to download everything they have posted from Fb to computers. Any sort of information would be updated on a personal computer including social status, profile, wall post etc. Whereas the dashboard helps provide more flexibility for users wishing to control better their applications. The new grouping feature targets those groups who wish to share comments, pictures and other links with acquaintances based on their relationships and interests. For instance, one can now group Facebook friends by college, family, work, and sports teams.

Facebook has already achieved a competitive edge as a social networking site. It does not have strong competitors. Though another social networking site called Orkut, has been left behind because of its outdated features with customers not finding the most require updates they wish to have in such networking areas, many have shifted to using Orkut.

FourSquare. This aggregate information on connection and location basis provides social networks with mobile access however, such service is already part of Facebook.

Tumblr. It provides a blogging platform with many kids sharing content, however, still Tumbir cannot surpass the area coverage by Facebook.

Twitter. It is a microblogging platform with features of Facebook except 140 asymmetric follow patterns and character messages which is a new feature however, this is not such a big threat to Facebook.

LinkedIn. This is specifically for the business gentry and therefore covers only certain individuals while Facebook is for everyone else.

Path. Path works against the principle of Facebook as it talks about smaller groups of friends. Path lets you share pictures and information with a close circle of friends. Still, social networks matter today so Facebook is still out.

Facebook is the world's largest social networking online web. On average there are 700 billion minutes spent in a month by Facebook's current users. The company has been increasing at a meteoric pace, doubling its size since 2009 and pushing competitors like Orkut and Twitter aside.

Through it is social networking worldwide still it has wider customer acceptance due to set defined standards of privacy that no other websites provide. There are defined privacy laws governing Facebook's actions due to which at times it has even been sued. But, so far it has the greater sales popularity with over 500 million users in 2010.

The largest social network worldwide has been rapidly increasing its membership at a steady pace for so many years gone by, however, even Facebook is almost touching saturation level for several of its age demographics. The good news that remains for Facebook is that it has still future potential to increase and retain its market share.

Where many competitors of Facebook are aspiring to gain, Facebook has gained a dominant position in many areas. This covers India besides the US, the UK and France also where earlier one of the Facebook rivals Orkut hold a dominant market up to the point that many felt that even Google is owned by Orkut though, in reality, it was the opposite. However, today Facebook is crushing the several years of effort of Orkut in India (Via FT).

The above figure reveals that without doubt, the major hazard in the way of Facebook's dominancy is China. Facebook has completely been blocked in China with 420 million internet users. Moreover, Japan, russia and Brazil have around 50 million internet users.

If Facebook could reach almost 50% in these not-yet-conquered countries, it can then earn much market share. If we sum up the above data we get 765 million users with 50% as about 382 million. Facebook has a large market to cover and still holds a dominant position in many others.