Quality Control

After hearing abou the 1 billion users, I decided to do some research into this market for myself. I found some of the stats in Cotton Delo’s recent article to be amazing, as I previously didn’t really know how to quantify Facebook’s success besides the recent IPO-which later turned out be somewhat of a spectacle. Let’s briefly recall what transpired in the past few months. Facebook goes public at an exaggerated listing price of $38 per share and then began to go downhill from there reaching lows of roughly $17 in early September.  The stock hasn’t rebounded quite yet but things are looking up, let me explain.

It is apparent that the social media giant has saturated large portions of North American and European markets. For examples in the US 61% of the 65-and-older population visited Facebook in August, while 87% of the 18-to-24 set did, according to ComScore. It’s really hard to get better than that.

The markets which will be undoubtedly targeted next by Facebook will be Japan and South Korea, as there is still large amounts of growth expected to occur in the social media realm in these nations. Japan for example only has 27.6% penetration and South Korea has about the same.  Additionally the issue of China is always of debate; just imagine the thousands of millions of our Chinese counterparts using Facebook if the Chinese government one day breaks the ‘great firewall of China’. In Russia however, Facebook is not facing the government but stiff competitors such as VKontakte and Odnoklassniki who have 10x the users facebook does. Below is a mini chart which explains the situation in a nutshell!

I personally feel Facebook will not stop in its quest to reach every corner of the plant, as demonstrated in part in their first ad released last week.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7SjvLceXgU