How Big Will Facebook Become?

Technology, especially social networking, has formed a huge part in society’s daily lives for the last several years. Facebook, one of the major social media platforms, as stated by Mark Hall in his article Facebook American Company, has become the largest social network with more than 1 billion users across the nations, and most of these users fall into the

Facebook, being the most popular, has over 24 million active users per day, which is 37.5% of the population. The beauty of social media is that users have an environment where they can share posts, photos, videos, and even music to people around the world instantly. Social media is evolving

Social media has taken the world by storm. Facebook currently has more than 1 billion active users, which is three times the number of people who live in the US. With so many people using Facebook it comes to no surprise that it has been made to have a negative influence from concerns over privacy, to people spending hours on the site and ultimately becoming addicted to it. But Facebook can also be a useful tool when used correctly, it helps people stay in touch, make new friends and it cures boredom.

The growth of the revenues directly depends on the growth of users. I believe this leaves the business very vulnerable and dependent on continuous growth of users, which will eventually be only marginally, as the social network already attracted so many users. The low barriers to entry is a direct threat to Facebook as expressed in paper #1. There are multiple new entries and advertising budgets are distributed over a broader social media platform to maximize their profitability. Ideally, investors would like to see multiple revenue streams. Facebook should explore new sources of revenue starting with monetizing some of core product lines. This report has proposed a suggestion on the resources that could be used.

In 2004, Harvard University was graced by the presences of Facebook, which began as a startup directory service specifically for students. Mark Zuckerberg envisioned a business plan that would provide networking services to college, then later, high school student, which grew extremely rapidly. As he continued to build on his business strategy, other groups of people were added that evolved into this massive internet technology (IT) business of today. Facebook sparked the interest of sites, investors as the pool of stakeholders increased phenomenally. As a business grows, so does increased risks in which Facebook was no exception. Risks such as competitors, privacy and security issues, user’s denial,

Facebook is currently largest social networking site in the world based on monthly unique visitors – attracting 130 million unique visitors every day (Alexa Inc. 2012). The site’s popularity exploded in 2007 and it bypassed its social networking rival, MySpace, in April 2008 (Phillips 2007). Over the last few years Facebook has impacted people’s social lives in various ways. With its availability on modern smart phones, Facebook enables users to continuously stay in touch with friends, relatives and peers wherever they are in the world as long as they have internet access. It can also group people together who share beliefs and interests and has been known to even reunite lost family members and friends through its enormous social reach

The next twelve months are pivotal for Facebook globally as the company faces significant challenges to its growth as both a worldwide social network and first location online people look to connect with one another. In many respects, Facebook is becoming more like a virtual phone book that can be used for quickly connecting with someone known in the past, just met or of interest (Baltzan, 2012). There are very significant business opportunities for Facebook both as a global social network and virtual phone book, in addition to large-scale implications for social change based on the pervasive adoption of this social networking platform. Benefits and challenges of social networking, along with the pervasive use of tags and crowdsourcing are discussion in this analysis as is the impact of Facebook on children.

There has been a lot of discussions about whether social network sites are a past craze or here to stay. In this essay, the concept of a social network site is narrower than that of social media, a social network can be defined as “ A dedicated website or other application which enables users to communicate with each other by posting information, comments, messages, images” (http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/social-network?q=social+network, no date). This means that the type of social network is independent from the type of media sharing websites, such as YouTube, and the type of Micro-blogging, such as Twitter. These social networks are often household names, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Belo. In fact, up to the second quarter of 2015, there were 1.49 billion monthly active users in Facebook (Statista, 2015). It’s clear that people like using social networking sites, interacting and sharing with other users which they can add as friends. Therefore, it is hard to say social networks are a passing fashion.

The “first” social networking site can be traced back to 1997 with sixdegrees.com. The success of this new kind of website was quickly followed by other social networking sites such as MySpace (2003), Facebook (2004), YouTube (2005), Twitter (2006), Tumblr (2007), Pinterest (2009), Instagram (2010), and Google+ (2012). With the popularity of one site sprung many others. They each fought over the best user-generated content and their own design. On October 4, 2012 Facebook reached one billion monthly users making it the most used social networking site ever created. The online community has grow to just about half of the world population.

What if Facebook was used to its fullest potential? In twelve years the social networking

By signing up for a free account users get to list: age, sex, race, faith, occupation, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, geographical location, ideological viewpoint, political position and place a photo of themselves. Before the development of these amazing social networking platforms many spent a typical day by simply waking up, grabbing breakfast, attending work or school and repeating the same process the very next day only slowing down for some face to face time with family and friend on weekends. Now, with advancement of Facebook people are able to keep in constant correspondence with their network of friends. A person can easily construct a post announcing a great morning, relay the most recent news on a favorite sports team, share the location of a new found eatery for a tasty low calorie high protein lunch, even promote the half price buy one get one free deal scored inside Macy at the local Fashion Island. Features like: “Sharing what’s on your mind” is not limited to text alone. According to Thomas J. Billitteri a CQ Research writer with over 30 years’ of experience covering business share a report from the Pew Research Center that ‘14 percent of online youths 12-17 have posted videos online’ (Billitteri). The power of video capture allows for popular culture to be celebration and broadcasted daily. Networking sites are brilliant gateways for monitoring such updates of friends -

Facebook could easily be the listed as the most successful social media site to-date. Facebook is a social utility that allows individuals to keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, share links and videos, and network with new friends. It succeeds its fellow social media competition with approximately 9 million users. To join Facebook users must be 13 years old with a valid email address (personal, school, or work). Facebook also offers a variety of features, including: instant messaging, personalized profiles, games, and music streaming. To stay connected throughout the day, Facebook offers its users a mobile applications that can be utilized on smartphones and tablets. In addition to the many features Facebook offers, it also connects its users with outside social media sites and

By virtue of the amount of time spent on the site, Facebook is the leading social media network. Founded in 2004, it is estimated that this social network had over a billion monthly active users in 2013. Facebook is free and enables its users to create profiles, keep in touch with their friends and upload or share pictures and videos. It has also been suggested Facebook largely caters to educated users. A Pew Internet and American Life Project report found the educational distribution of Facebook users to be as follows: pre high school 5 percent, high school 26 percent, trade school or some college 34 percent, bachelor degree 20 percent, and graduate school 15 percent. Despite majority of its users being educated, most Facebook users are complacent towards issues of privacy or the risks of internet usage in general. In 2005, serious flaws in Facebook’s set up that would enable breaches in people’s privacy and allow for data mining were

Perhaps one of the most telltale indicators of the power and influence Facebook would eventually have over the world was in 2006, when a company, Student Monitor, conducted a survey on college students. According to the survey, Facebook was tied with beer as the second most popular thing among undergraduates, only behind the iPod. Since 2008 when they dethroned Myspace, Facebook has been the leading social networking site based on monthly unique visitors. However, the social network had been getting recognition even before such an exciting feat. PC Magazine put Facebook in their 2007 “Top 100 Classic Websites”. They also won the Weebly’s “People’s Voice Award” in 2008. Each year from 2008-2010, the company won Crunchie’s “Best Overall Startup or Product”.

Social networking sites continue to gain in users and popularity. The first social networking sites were created in the 1990’s (Edosomwan et al. 3). These sites included Six Degrees, BlackPlanet, and MoveOn (Edosomwan et al. 3). Some of these sites are still in existence. The most popular social networking site, Facebook, was launched in February 2004 (Edosomwan et al. 4). After 6 years Facebook was noted to have over 500 million active users (Edosomwan et al. 4). As of March 2015, Facebook had 1.4 billion active users (Statista). Social networking sites have changed the way we connect to each