Marketing Assignment 2: Facebook — how far can it go?

When I was looking through marketing classmates’ blog posts trying to find inspirations, Louisa Yeung’s “ Marketing Post #1: Are you embarrassed of your past? “ jumped right into my eyes. The new feature that Facebook carried out – Timeline has been one of the popular topics among my friends.  Moreover, Facebook had already announced that Timeline would become a non-optional feature for all users. It really had become some big, even to less frequent Facebook users as me.

Back to the time when Louisa published her comment, Timeline was still a new feature that Facebook introduced to its users for try out. Some brave ones made their moves while the majority held its opinion. But after Facebook’s announcement on Jan. 24^th, Timeline officially became non-optional to all Facebook users. After the first notification from Facebook group, you will have a 7-day preview period to set up your Timeline and familiarize yourself with it. After 7 days, there goes your brand new Facebook homepage.

Although this unstoppable feature had already embarrassed so many people, most users choose to spend hours resetting their accounts or starting new accounts instead of giving up on Facebook, as Louisa Yeung commented in her blog. I totally agreed with her opinion about this phenomenon. Facebook somehow plays the role of a monopoly in social networking – instead of running a more customer-managed relationship as most firms do nowadays, Facebook has relatively powerful control in its company as well as the industry. Even its major competitor  “Twitter” couldn’t take place of Facebook – although the two share similarities, the distinct feature that Facebook offers couldn’t be replaced by Twitter. The massive market shares that Facebook owned keeps its competitor away.

Facebook initially segmented and targeted its market at young college students in the States, but since it demonstrated strong comparative advantages in its product – the convenience of social networking and the advance of technology, the company quickly grabbed customers even outside of its original target market. After years of adapting and modifying its features based on customer’s needs and feedbacks, Facebook held its place in the market. No need to mention the glorious story of Facebook, what really caught my interest was Facebook’s IPO. The company had filed its registration to go public on Febuary 1^st with a valuation of $100 billion. The social giant seeked to raise $5 billion in initial funding, which was one of the largest IPOs in technology history.  With its 845 million monthly active users and half being daily users, Facebook’s IPO came in late after its founding 8 years ago. No matter the numerous arguments about its valuation of $100 billion would settled  down or not, the huge market potential behind Facebook couldn’t be avoided by marketers and investors. With its brand new features and IPO, Facebook stands in the middle of a transformation. It has been gone along the way, the only question left is — how far can it go?

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/02/facebook-ipo-2/all/1