Discussion

With the rise in the trends of social networking websites, there have been a major form of rise of the social media websites. A wide form of research on the usage of social media sites by the people have shown to have a major form of growth in the recent past years (Curty & Zhang, 2013). The usage of different kinds of social media networks such as Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp has increased on a global basis. This has helped in playing a major role in the lives of the people. They have helped in applying a major form of role in the lives of the people. Based on the conduction of review of the choices of different people, it has been seen that Facebook has been considered as one of the most preferable social networking problem. Facebook is regarded as one of the most preferred website by various users (Leung et al., 2013). This is not because of the huge number of users but also due to an incredible analytics suite. The social networking platform has the capability to analyse their customers and their changing behaviour based on a micro-level based on the ever-changing algorithm that has been inbuilt within their website and the mobile applications.

Facebook is considered as one of the most popular social networking website that was launched in 2004. The company was launched by Mark Zuckerberg. Initially the membership of the website was limited to the students of Harvard. Later it was expanded to different other colleges within the Boston area and other universities in Canada and United States (Van Dijck, 2013).

With the launch of the social networking website, it had gained much popularity in the initial years. The nature of Facebook gradually propelled from various educational institutions to anybody who would have a registered email address. The social networking platform is a free and open source platform, which enlarges their profitability based on advertisements and raising of revenue. The features of the platform have continued to develop in the recent years (Bicen & Uzunboylu, 2013). In the recent developments, the users have been provided with different new form of facilities such as gifting their friends, posting advertisements and thus developing their personal applications.

Facebook has a history of claiming a huge customer base. They have a record of over 1.13 billion active users through which they have known to have claimed around 27.63 billion of revenue in the year of 2016. Based on recent reviews from people residing from all over the world, Facebook has become the most popular social networking website (Baden-Fuller & Haefliger, 2013). Though there are different other kinds of social networking websites in the world such as Instagram and WhatsApp, but still the organisation has maintained to establish a broader customer base in the world. They have also been able to collect immense form of revenue in each year.

History of Facebook

Ever since the inception of Facebook, the organisation has a record of continuously changing their model of business and thus innovating new kinds of features and services in order to meet the demands and expectations of their customers. The massive business model of Facebook have constituted the major companies from all over the world. They include Facebook Payments Inc., Atlas, WhatsApp, Parse, Instagram and many others.

Though most of the massive kinds of services that are provided by Facebook are aimed to generate a huge amount of revenue, there are some services that would be meant for generating a huge amount of data. The generated data would primarily range from gaining the information of user accounts based on their behaviour on the internet and their histories on their phone (Gwebu, Wang & Guo, 2014). This form of strategy have majorly helped Facebook to suppress their competitors and hence hold a major share over the market.

Some of the major form of services that are offered by Facebook and are included within their business model are:

Facebook.com – The most favourite social media network in the world, such as Facebook would help people for connecting with their family, friends and other people from all over the world. With the expansion of their model of business, Facebook has also launched their smaller version of their application, which is known as Facebook Lite. This service was launched in 2015. This new service has been able to incur the biggest source of revenue based on the parent company.

Messenger – The organisation had separated their chat facility from their application and has also launched a newer version of chat application, which is known as Messenger. This is a form of mobile messaging application that would provide the facility to their users to send messages and stickers privately (Yang et al., 2016). The messaging platform also supports services to their users such as chatting within groups, making free video and audio calls, even with people from different countries.

Marketplace – With the introduction of the online shopping platform, Facebook has once again took a step forward to establish a broad base of customers. The Facebook Marketplace would be similar to other forms of online shopping platforms with an integrated facility of messaging. This has also made Facebook as a social marketplace (Ali, Sabetta & Bezzi, 2013).

Workplace – The Workplace offered by Facebook is a form of in-house social network, which has provided the facility to companies in order to establish a connection with other companies. A workplace profile would be very much different from the personal profile of the users. In order to register for a profile within Workplace, the users and the companies would have to pay a certain price.

Development of Facebook

Instagram – The Instagram has been defined as the most lovable social media platform just after Facebook. It could be defined as an image sharing network that would allow the people to share their moments with the people whom they want to get access to the photos.

WhatsApp – This social media platform is one of the leading messaging platform. The platform provides end-to-end encryption and full form of digitised instant form of messaging service. This platform makes use of the internet for sending and receiving of messages (Karapanos, Teixeira & Gouveia, 2016). The service platform also competes with the major companies.

The users of Facebook have helped the company to earn lots of money and thus help in increasing the revenue of the company. Hence, this has become as one of the most important and topmost priority. As a major form of social media platform, Facebook could be defined as a major black hole based on Big Data (Woerner & Wixom, 2015). They have always made successful usage of that data in order to generate a high amount of revenue based on their targeted advertisements. Facebook has thus expanded their feathers within the core markets of UK, USA and Canada and to other parts of the world with their massive hit of the idea of user saturation.

It was noticed by Facebook that half of the population of the world does not have access to the Internet. Hence, the phase one of their business strategy was meant to provide internet access to everyone. This form of Internet would be provided at a very low cost or even at no cost. As Facebook had planned to run their applications on every device, hence they had implemented to bring Snaptu in the year 2011. This was a free application platform that had the capability to run on any Internet-enabled smartphone. Facebook also implemented Onavo, which is based on mobile analytics. The application helps in providing their users with the latest information about the consumption of data and thus would help them in compression of data (Pagani, 2013). This application was introduced by Facebook in the year 2013 for enhancing the Facebook Lite experience and internet.org.

Just after reviewing the accessibility of Facebook to each and every users, the next essential step for the organisation was to tap them and generate a considerable portion of revenue. The recent statistics in relation to the percentage of revenue are totally in favour based on the implemented strategy by Facebook. As there is an increase in the total spent time on the application, generation of services and a rapid increase in the number of advertisement impressions, the organisation would be making a huge amount of money.

The Business Model of Facebook

                                                                (Fig 1: Growth of Facebook in the Recent Years)

Facebook is considered as one of the most popular social media platform. Though there is a high level of competition, Facebook would also remain at the top among the social media giants. Facebook has many competitors within the market. The company has also been able to suppress their competitors within the market due to an immense amount of development and research in several fields (Bakshy, Messing & Adamic, 2015). The factors of R&D would be the utmost importance of Facebook in order to retain and expand their features. Facebook performs a huge amount of R&D in order to lift their application within the world market. With the help of performing a huge amount of research, Facebook would be able to enhance the user experience. The factor of research and development would play a major role for Facebook to expand their user base. Understanding the needs of the customer would be a major form of need before them.

As Facebook has become one of the biggest social media platform, hence the organisation would require a huge cost effective management in order to maintain to the services that are provided by them (Ramsaran-Fowdar & Fowdar, 2013). Other costs include sales and marketing expense that would be incurred on products and people.

                                                               (Fig 2: Flowchart of the interdependency of Facebook)

Though the primary form of income of Facebook does not depend on selling of user data, the main source of generation of revenue is based on advertisements that would involve the making usage of user data based on targeting. Some of the different sources of the generation of revenue for Facebook are:

The business model of Facebook is based on the generation of revenue based on their unique ability for providing targeted advertisements. Many new platforms such as Messenger, WhatsApp and other websites and applications have also been added to their network (Kim et al., 2016). In order to make marketers to put high investments within their platform, Facebook has also modified their newsfeed algorithm.

The Companies associated by Facebook

There are different games such as Candy Crush, Farmville and many others, which have the option of making payments based on virtual currency. These applications and games have a major role in developing a framework based on the business model of Facebook. A significant part of the type of payments would reach to Facebook that would act as a payment gateway based on those games and applications (Casadesus?Masanell & Zhu, 2013).

This is one of the private social networking service meant for companies. People and employees have the option of connecting with different companies in order to discuss ideas based on different projects and ideas.

Facebook owns an innovative future plan based on increasing their hold over the market. They have an immense form of strategy based on bringing access to the internet for everyone. These are helpful with the introduction of solar drones, express Wi-Fi and internet.org. Facebook has also introduced project ARIES and Terragraph based on providing consistent and high speed internet experience. Facebook has also moved into the virtual reality sector with the acquirement of Oculus (Rainie, Smith & Duggan, 2013). They have also promised to integrate the platform within the social media platform.

Conclusion:

Hence, from the above discussion, it could be concluded that Facebook has a huge market opportunity to grow and enhance the customer experience. They have innovating new kinds of changes and thus generating huge amount of revenue. The sales and marketing cost of Facebook include the expenses based on better user interface and various other services that are provided to different users, developers and marketers in order to attract their attention and thus be able to retain them. Hence, Facebook has a huge opportunity for growth and expand in the social media market.

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