Though Facebook is becoming an essential part of many people’s lives today, the amount of critics that it is receiving is also increasing. Recently, Facebook has changed platform to a new design. Based on the poll application on the website, 94% of the 63 thousand people that participated in the poll hate the new design of the platform and 1.7 million people signed a petition hoping that Facebook could bring back the old design.
However, the biggest critic in regards to Facebook is whether or not it’s going to last. In fact, there are people out there that think this new toy is just a temporary hype that will soon fade as another new widget comes out. However, that is not necessary true. It is expected that growth rate will slow down eventually, which company doesn’t? But, when will that happen is what people need to think about. Ten years? Twenty years? Also, with the amount of users that have already existed on Facebook, even if a new widget does come out, the turnover rate may not be high because people might have already adapted to Facebook’s platform.
A new widget doesn’t always mean it will have the possibility to completely take over the old one. Looking at Facebook and MySpace today, MySpace is still popular, and there are still a lot of people using it. In fact, the newest trend today in society is to have both. People, who have used MySpace before, are also Facebook users now. Though both platforms try to perform in a very similar matter, every platform is unique in its way. There are things that Facebook has that MySpace may not have. Because of that, there are facts that need to be considered why this company will strive to survive for the next decade or so.
Facebook “helps you connect and share with the people in your life.” (Company slogan as it appears when one visits facebook.com) The CEO of this website, Mark Zuckerberg, strongly states that Facebook is a “social utility.” It sounds original, but more importantly, it is extremely powerful in terms of its popularity. It took 89 years for telephone to reach 150 million users, and thinking about something popular recently, iPod took 7 years to reach that same number of users, but Facebook only took 5 years from 2004 to today. Every week, 5 million users are joining this website globally. The growth rate is significant, and it is too popular that one probably cannot resist to even sign-up an account for it. Today, there are more than 175 million users on Facebook. This number is 20 million short to the population of Brazil and 10 million above Pakistan. In other words, Facebook users can form a country!
With these fascinating numbers in mind, it is evident that the company is one of the most popular websites. That tells a lot. Because so many users are around, it can’t fail right away unless there are some serious issues with its service. Imagine Facebook as Citigroup, a new big and popular bank that opens tomorrow may affect Citigroup, but the damage won’t make the entire cooperation collapse.
Globalization: It’s NOT American; it is the WORLD.
Though the founder of this website is an American born in New York who dropped out from the prestigious Harvard University, the website itself is not American at all. Like Google, MSN, and many other web service providers, Facebook now offers more than 63 languages since 2008. When a website offers this kind of language utility, it opens up its market and gives this organization a potential to attract a lot of other business outside of the States. In fact, many will probably think Facebook is heavily used by Americans, those people are wrong. More than 70% of the users on this website are outside of America. Let’s look at this beautiful stats table of top 10 countries with the most Facebook users produced by Nick Burcher, Head of Social Media and Audience Messages EMEA in London:
| Country |
| Number of Facebook Users |
| USA |
| 27,811,560 |
| UK |
| 11,171,540 |
| Canada |
| 9,621,820 |
| Turkey |
| 3,464,640 |
| Australia |
| 3,217,380 |
| France |
| 2,461,140 |
| Colombia |
| 2,412,000 |
| Chile |
| 2,105,820 |
| Norway |
| 1,170,660 |
| Sweden |
| 1,141,700 |
http://www.nickburcher.com/2008/07/facebook-user-numbers-by-country-and.html
Cool enough to notice, there are approximately 147 million users that are not American. On top of that, it is noted from other statistics tables in Nick Burcher’s website that USA is not in the top 10 countries of “highest Facebook penetration.” The winner of the number of Facebook users as a percentage of population is actually Canada with close to 29% of its country’s population. “Half of all Canadians on the internet are also users of Facebook,” said Wagman, a professor at Carlton University in Canada. (http://news.therecord.com/News/Local/article/494494) USA is, for sure, the center of the world’s financial sector, but that does not mean all the money in this world flow directly to USA only. To be a successful business, one has to realize that there are many other currencies out there that can make one valuable; Facebook has captured this thought. Without customers, there is no profit. Hence, Facebook has done a great job in recruiting so many members, and this is only the beginning of its true success in the long run.
Diversity in Age and Purposes.
Someone who can read a graph and understand basic statistic will say this graph is skewed to the right with lots of outliers and its mode is in the age of 19 or 20. Well, it is obvious because it is understandable that many Internet users are around those ages. However, throwing statistics aside, what is more interesting about this graph is there are actually users above the age of 50s, even 60s (The age of grandparents). Unlike MySpace, whose target audience is said to be teenagers but actually most users are above the age of 35, Facebook is more like a real organization. Zuckerberg has created a platform for everyone from any age to use. By having reached to this point, Zuckerberg has really gone beyond his original purpose. Facebook is not just a “social utility.” It is now a major form of communication with multi-purposes depending on who the user is and what he or she is looking for. For a college student, Facebook may be a social utility to make friends, stalk the person that one likes, or even to learn more information about companies. Yet, for parents and even grandparents, their purposes can be complicated. Parents may use it to check out what their kids are doing or saying over the Internet, and grandparents are probably primarily searching for their old friends, long disappearing neighbors, or someone who they miss. Looking around a lot of successful business in this world, one would conclude that a lot of businesses do not solely focus on one product or service. Instead, they are conglomerates, a combination of many ventures in different industries. Two things in common between the top 100 Fortune companies and Facebook are that they all provide many different purposes based on customers’ choices, and they serve not only to a specific group of people, but a variety of people in all ages and many aspects.
Culture: Passion Driven and Strong Management:
In the most recent article published in Fortune’s magazine in February, “How Facebook is taking over our lives?” the writer Jessi Hempel questions her readers if or not Facebook is a real business. The question seems absurd and ironic in a sense because one might wonder if Facebook is not a real business then why it is even published in Fortune, a real business magazine writing about companies. Having read the article and thought a lot about general misleading information taught by society, the purpose of Jessi Hempel’s question became more visible and transparent. When one thinks of business, one will definitely relates this word to profit, money, investment, and many other financial related words. However, the correlation of these words to Facebook is, from an investment banker’s perspective, weakly associated. In fact, Hempel is trying to address the misconception of the word “business.” Facebook is not earning tons of billions, and it is not even in the top 500 Fortune companies. It possesses the opposite mission of AOL of which its parent company, Time Warner, hammers heavily on making profits and producing more revenues for the company. Facebook does not make its users feel like there are tons of ads flashing everywhere when visiting the website. (If you go visit MySpace right now; you will realize what I am talking about.) To elaborate a little bit on advertisement, Facebook actually gives its users a chance to decide what ads should show up based on the user’s preferences. Therefore, a business operation does not strictly mean it has to make a lot of profits for its shareholders, but most of all, it should have a sense of culture that provides the company with a mission or passion to achieve something beyond money.
“Zuckerberg prefers to leave the question of revenues to Sandberg [COO of Facebook], who punts: “I think what’s really important is that we are able to fund our expansion, and we’re very focused on that”…Early board member Jim Breyer, who put in $1 million of his own money and 12.7 million from an Accel Partners fund, says that profits are “a secondary consideration in this stage of the growth.” ”
Here is a quick view of some key people in the organization, current positions, and their formal companies:
| Name | Current Position | Formal Company/Position |
| Sheryl Sandberg | Chief Operating Officer | Google; built AdWords Formal student and follower of Larry Summers (head of the White House’s National Economic Council) |
| Gideon Yu | Finance | YouTube CFO |
| Don Graham | Board Member | Washington Post publisher |
| Jim Breyer | Board Member | Venture capitalist |
| Peter Thiel | Technology | PayPal co-founder |
| Marc Andreessen | Technology | Netscape founder |
Seriously looking at these people and their backgrounds, it’s crazy! They are prestigious, well-known in their fields, and very valuable people to big-money-making companies. Their goal in Facebook is not to make themselves billionaires; if they were, they would’ve stayed in their original companies or even gone to other places. Many of the people in senior management level of Facebook are very passionate to create a new generation of mass media. As a result, it is evident to say that Facebook gets a strong culture going on. People wear jeans and t-shirts to work, very similar to employees at Google. People inside that organization are creative and responsible to work together. They are trying to be the next Microsoft; they are hoping to create a legend of communication that is spread over the world through Internet. These people are making enough money through some advertisements that are sustainable for its growth. At the end, it is impossible to deny that Facebook is a real business because it has a very influential culture that provides the solution to many people’s needs, and it is and will be successful as long as it remains the way it is until new changes in situations and customer demands.
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