Today i will write about world's no 1 social networking platform i.e. Facebook.
Facebook is a social networking service and Web site launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc.As of July 2011, Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users may create a personal profile, add other users as friends, and exchange messages, including automatic notifications when they update their profile. Facebook users must register before using the site. Additionally, users may join common-interest user groups, organized by workplace, school or college, or other characteristics, and categorize their friends into lists, e.g. "People From Work", or "Really Good Friends". The name of the service stems from the colloquial name for the book given to students at the start of the academic year by university administrations in the United States to help students get to know each other. Facebook allows any users who declare themselves to be at least 13 years old to become registered users of the Web site.
Who Founded Facebook ?
Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.The Web site's membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It gradually added support for students at various other universities before opening to high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over. However, based onConsumersReports on May 2011, there are 7.5 million children under 13 with accounts, violating the site's terms.
Facebook Rank History
A January 2009 Compete study ranked Facebook as the most used social networking service by worldwide monthly active users, followed by MySpace. Entertainment Weeklyincluded the site on its end-of-the-decade "best-of" list, saying, "How on earth did we stalk our exes, remember our co-workers' birthdays, bug our friends, and play a rousing game of Scrabulous before Facebook?"Quantcast estimates Facebook has 138.9 million monthly unique U.S. visitors in May 2011. According to Social Media Today, an estimated 41.6% of the U.S. population had a Facebook account.Nevertheless, Facebook's market growth started to stall in some regions, with the site losing 7 million active users in the United States and Canada in May 2011.
Revenue Earned By Facebook
Most of Facebook's revenue comes from advertising. Microsoft is Facebook's exclusive partner for serving banner advertising and therefore Facebook serves only advertisements that exist in Microsoft's advertisement inventory.
| Year | Revenue | Growth |
|---|---|---|
| 2006 | $52 | — |
| 2007 | $150 | 188% |
| 2008 | $280 | 87% |
| 2009 | $775 | 177% |
| 2010 | $2,000 | 158% |
| 2011 | $4,270 | 114% |
Sarah Smith, who was Facebook's Online Sales Operations Manager, confirmed that successful advertising campaigns can have clickthrough rates as low as 0.05% to 0.04%, and that CTR for ads tend to fall within two weeks. Competing social network MySpace's CTR, in comparison, is about 0.1%, 2.5 times better than Facebook's but still low compared to many other Web sites. Explanations for Facebook's low CTR include the fact that Facebook's users are more technologically savvy and therefore use ad blocking software to hide advertisements, that users are younger and therefore better at ignoring advertising messages, and that MySpace users spend more time browsing through content, while Facebook users spend their time communicating with friends and therefore have their attention diverted away from advertisements.
On pages for brands and products, however, some companies have reported CTR as high as 6.49% for Wall posts.Involver, a social marketing platform, announced in July 2008 that it managed to attain a CTR of 0.7% on Facebook (over 10 times the typical CTR for Facebook ad campaigns) for its first client, Serena Software, managing to convert 1.1 million views into 8,000 visitors to their Web site A study found that, for video advertisements on Facebook, over 40% of users who viewed the videos viewed the entire video, while the industry average was 25% for in-banner video ads.
Enjoy facebook :)
Have a good day :)
Take Care
C@ndy
