Reasons Behind the Phenomenal Success of Facebook - Essay Example

The Main Reasons Behind the Phenomenal Success of Facebook and Whether the Rapid Growth of the Last Decade Can Be Sustained Over the past decade, the social media has played a crucial role changing the way people interact and its usage has developed and spread quickly all over the world. Various social networks have been developed, and today millions of people are using them to gain access to all sorts of information they need and also to interact with people from various parts of the world. The first social media site to sit the site and Zuckerberg gain popularity was Facebook, which has grown to tremendous level over the years and is now in use by almost every computer literate individual (Vermon, 2012). The site has recorded tremendous growth since its inception, and this is owed to various factors as will be discussed in this paper. The success of Facebook mainly lies on the fact that the company has endeavored to improve the products it offers so that they meet the requirements of users (Walter, 2013). At first, the company did not dwell on making profits, but with the increased dependency of people on Facebook for various purposes it started making profits from advertising and selling data that was exchanged through the site. Facebook has developed to be one of the most popular sites since its inception in 2004 and continues to gather a following to the present day. Being the largest social media site, Facebook was started as a theory in 2003 by Zuckerberg, a Harvard student and was known as Facemash.com., at that time (Phillips, 2007). The site allowed Zuckerberg’s classmates to visit the site and compare how attractive people were, but was criticized and it did not become a success then. However, in 2004 mark launched the Facebook and within a day more than 1200 Harvard students had signed up and created a profile. In no time, word spread around, and the founders of the site saw it necessarily to open the site to other universities in the states. As at august 2005, the site was bought for 200,000$ and was now referred to as faceboo.com (Phillips, 2007). High schools in the United States were now allowed to create profiles and as at September the same year, it began to be known all over the world with the united kingdom universities being the first to know about the site after the united states. As word spread all over the world about the site, the network grew beyond being only used in schools but was now accessible to anybody who wanted to join and had an email address. The fact that the site was free to join made it easy for it to grow as more features were added to it to make user friendly. It made profits through advertising, and this enabled the founders to invest more into making it user friendly and more people began using it to gain access to a wide range of information and to connect with people from all over (Walter, 2013). With the widespread use of the network, companies such as Google and yahoo reached out to Zuckerberg to sell the network out, but he refused. However, in October 2007, Microsoft bought shares worth 240,000$ which amounted to 1.6% shares. The network continued growing and had reached the 500, 000 mark as at July 2010, and 845million users as at 2011 (Phillips, 2007). Today, despite the fact that the network was started in the United States reports indicate that more than 70% of its users live outside the United States, and this shows the tremendous growth that the company has recorded (Phillips, 2007). Today, Facebook has become not only popular with students but also with adults, institutions and businesses. The fact that opening an account with Facebook is free has seen the tremendous growth of the site as people are able to open and create an account at any time and share information with their friends and also meet new people. People are now able to find and make new friends easily. The network has been made user friendly and more features have been added to it over time and this has continued to increase its following. The developers have endeavored to add new features such as finding interest groups, organizing events and even playing online games (Vermon, 2012). Development of these new features saw to it that more users became interested in the site as it offered a platform to have fun with friends online and also share information. Features such as voice calls and chat messaging were developed to make communication confidential, and this was seen as a strategy to increase security on the sites unlike before when information one posted would be seen by everyone (Pavie, 2010). Facebook developers got the interest of many and became more popular that sites that were in existence before. The fact that the network is now available in more than 70 languages has made it grow as more and more people are able to use it in their local languages (Zeevi, 2012). This is an alteration from the past when sites that were available were only in English, and this made it difficult for people who are not conversant in English not to be able to use these sites. Now that the network has been translated to various languages, people from various backgrounds are able to access the site and use it at comfort and connect with different people hence the tremendous growth. Initially, Facebook was created for students, but now has been opened for anyone or any organization to open an account, post and share information. Many businesses and corporations have take up social media advertising to promote their products, and this is another reason for the growth of the network (Miller, 2011). Companies from all over the world create profiles where they conduct customer relationship management in terms of advertising and informing consumers about their products. This implies that the network has created a common ground for conducting business because people can now search information about a certain company on this site and also the companies can update their profile regularly so as to inform customers about their products (Fredricksen & Duffy, 2013). This common ground for business has seen tremendous growth for Facebook as more people visit the site to find information they need. Despite the tremendous growth over the years, reports indicate that other sites are taking over the market, and the future of Facebook is not promising. Today, the company’s growth has slowed down as more user friendly sites such as twitter and Google+ have come to be preferred by more users (eBizMBA Inc., 2013). There are serious rival companies to Facebook which have come up and they have taken up a large share of the market and these include Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, MySpace and Google Plus+ just to name the main ones. Despite the fact that these companies have not attained the number of Facebook users, reports indicate that the profits of Facebook are going down while those for these other sites are low but are rising at an alarming rate. Twitter to be particular has seen a rise in following and it is now being mentioned in the media more than Facebook (Udhaw, 2011). Celebrities and anchors are now using more of twitter than Facebook, and it is projected that in the near future, twitter will grow and surpass Facebook. These new sites have created friendlier sites that Facebook as people feel that Facebook is too big, and it has become more of a marketplace with various advertisements from companies and this takes all the fun that some people look for. Companies such as twitter are projected to grow as more people discover it and comparing this with Facebook which has the market almost tied up meaning that there will be less growth as most people have already joined the site. As people begin to discover new sites, it is expected that the new companies will experience growth while that of Facebook declines or rises slowly as time passes since it has already reached its peak. References eBizMBA Inc. 2013. Top 15 Most Popular Social Networking Sites | April 2013. Accessed April 16, 2013{http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/social-networking-websites} Fredricksen, C & Duffy, D. (2013). eMarketer: Unexpected Growth from Facebook, Google Lead to Significant Uptick in US Mobile Advertising, eMarketer, Accessed April 16, 2013. {http://www.emarketer.com/newsroom/index.php/unexpected-growth-facebook-google-lead-significant-uptick-mobile-advertising-us-market-share/} Miller D. 2011. Tales from Facebook, Polity, New York. Pavie, X. 2010. Strategic Analysis of the Internationalization of the Social Network Facebook, ESSEC Publishing, Massachusetts. Phillips, S. 2007. A brief history of Facebook. The Guardian, Wednesday 25 July 2007. Accessed April 16, 2013 {http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/jul/25/media.newmedia}. Udhaw. 2011. Mark Zuckerberg, the Man behind the Phenomenal Success of Facebook. Successstories.Co.In , Accessed April 16, 2013 {http://www.successstories.co.in/mark- zuckerberg-the-man-behind-the-phenomenal-success-of-facebook/} Vermon, L. 2012. A Closer Look into Facebook Including Its History, Founders, Software, and More, Websters Digital Services, Baldwin. Walter, E. 2013. Think Like Zuck: The Five Business Secrets of Facebooks Improbably Brilliant CEO Mark Zuckerberg. McGraw Hill Professional, New York. Zeevi, D. (2012). The History of Facebook Ultimate . Social Media Today LLC. Accessed April 16, 2013. { http://socialmediatoday.com/daniel-zeevi/1251026/ultimate-history- facebook-infographic} Read More