Growth and Development of Facebook - Essay Example

? Facebook Introduction The growth of facebook since its introduction was phenomenal. When it was introduced, many people perceived it just as another communication channel or social network rather than anything else. However the influence of facebook over human life at present is tremendous and it is difficult to describe it in words. Business, marketing, advertising, politics etc are some segments in which facebook contributed heavily to the global public apart from providing instant communication opportunities. The recent political developments in Arab world are believed to be stimulated by facebook. In fact the current Arab revolution is referred as facebook revolution. “The dictator of Tunisia was overthrown in less than one month after being in power for 23 years. There is no question about how opponents of his regime were able to topple it. Two words describe it: Facebook, Twitter” (North, 2011). In Libya also facebook contributed heavily for the expulsion of Gadhafi. In short, the influence of facebook over human life is growing day by day. The founding of Facebook “Facebook was founded in 2004 by a former-Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg”. He has also pointed out that “facebook and its idea spread across the college campus within months from launching and at present it is the second largest social networking site, second only to my space as far as traffic is concerned” (Marshable, 2010). The founding of facebook has raised some controversies about the ownership of the idea of facebook. Mark Zuckerberg was accused of stealing the idea of his college roommates and fellow computer science students. Anyway, it is a fact that in early 2003 itself, the idea of creating a social network was in the mind of Zuckerberg. In fact he has started another social network Buddy Zoo in 2003 itself with the help of some of his close friends. In January 2004, Zuckerberg started writing the source codes of facebook and on February 4, he launched Thefacebook. In 2005, the name Thefacebook has been changed to Facebook. Controversies regarding the founding of facebook Former Harvard classmates Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss claim that Zuckerberg stole their idea for a social networking site whilst he was employed by them to assist with the sites development, the site in question being connectu.com. They filed a lawsuit as early as 2004 but the case was dismissed in March 2007, although it was quickly re-filed in Boston, eventually Facebook settled the case for $65m (Ryankette, 2011). Still there are many stories spreading about the stealing of this idea by Zuckerberg. “After Facebook announced the settlement, but before the settlement was finalized, lawyers for the Winklevosses suggested that the hard drive from Mark Zuckerberg's computer at Harvard might contain evidence of Mark's fraud”(Carlson, 2010). Critics label him as a cheat. It should be noted that besides Zuckerberg, there three co-founders for facebook; Dustin Moskovitz, Eduardo Saverin, and Chris Hughes. In short, the disputes about the ownership of the idea of facebook created lot of negative publicity to facebook. What made Facebook a success today? According to Shih (2009), “right this moment at least 150000000 people are interacting with friends and talking about the brands on facebook”(Shih, 2009, p.i). The success of facebook primarily lies in its ability to attract business people towards it. Business has realised the potentials of facebook quickly in conducting its marketing campaigns successfully. Facebook users normally share their ideas and opinions about the new products they might have purchased recently and this type of publicity is even better than word of mouth publicity for business people. So they have shown increased interests in posting marketing ads in facebook which helped facebook to grow considerably. Marketers can make use of targeted ads to reach specific segments of customers using facebook and that also with a minimal spending for advertising. Facebook ads are more effective and cheaper than other conventional ads. “An influx of older users—professionals in their 30s and 40s, many in high-tech—is changing the face of Facebook” (Ricadela, 2007). Another success factor of facebook is its ability to attract student community. It is fact that facebook attracts everyone globally irrespective of children, youths or old people; however, student community seems to be more interested in facebook whereas adults and old people use twitter like social networks more frequently. Hunt (2009) has argued that “people are on social networks to connect and build relationships. Relationships and connections over time lead to trust, which is the key to form social capital” (Hunt, 2009, p.2). When it was introduced, facebook never thought about attracting international users. However, within a short time period, it attracted users from all over the world. In other words, facebook helped cross cultural communication immensely which is another success factor of it. The recent revolutions in Arab world are believed to be the contributions of facebook. As mentioned earlier, the current Arab revolution is labelled as facebook revolution by many people because of the huge role played by facebook in educating the Arab world about the necessities of having a democratic administration in their country. Zuckerberg’s “marketing” scheme  According to Zuckerberg, innovation, giving emphasize on bold decisions, news feeds, converting social networks into social platforms etc are the major success factors of facebook. He has also stressed the importance of encouraging best people to join his company as another success factor of facebook in an interview (Mark Zuckerberg: The Three Keys To Facebook's Success, 2009). The potentials of social networks for business purposes have been unveiled for the first time by Zuckerberg. Even though there were many other social networks established well before facebook, none of them tasted success as does by facebook. Zuckerberg converted social network concepts from a traditional communication channel to marketing channel. Banner ads and other marketing ads placed on every facebook pages with utmost precision. Zuckerberg asked his engineers to monitor the conversations of the people on facebook and realise the tastes of each and every user. He then started to place ads suitable to the tastes of each individual user and therefore none of the users found any disturbance in watching such ads. Expansion of Facebook  On August 10th, 2009, Facebook has announced the acquisition of real time news aggregator company, FriendFeed (O’Neill, 2009). FriendFeed was created by a former Google employee, Paul Buchheit. “In September 2009, Facebook has acquired Malaysian startup Octazen Solutions, which specializes in contact importing”(Cutlor, 2010). “On April 2, 2010, Facebook announced the acquisition of a photo-sharing service called Divvyshot”(Schonfeld, 2010). Comparison with competitors and their mistakes “According to Moskovitz, one of the co-founders of facebook, Google+ failed to attract more users because of the absence of symmetry to the relationships” (Perez, 2011). When Google+ announced its entry, many people thought that it may expel facebook from its top spot as the leading social network in the world. However, Google + failed to prosper properly because of the absence of user friendly interfaces and improper marketing campaigns. It should be noted that G+ was reluctant to provide membership to all users initially. The above reluctance created more problems to G+. “When Facebook first arrived, there were only a handful of companies, so it was able to attract top engineers” (Perez, 2011). Thus facebook was able to appoint some of the topmost computer engineers at the top level of the company. Even though Google had enormous resources, it failed to identify the potentials of socail networks over search engine business. “As Facebook's audience grows, it is attracting more online advertising and stunting Google's financial growth. Perhaps even more troubling to Google, much of the information on Facebook's website can't be indexed by Google's search engine” (Schmidt, 2011). Most of the other competitors of facebook such as twitter, myspace, linkedln etc are concentratin on some specific segments. Twitter is targeting more matured adults whereas linkedln is focusing more on unemployed youths. Facebook on the other hand caters the needs of all the people irrespective of their social status. 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