Company Introduction
Initially founded by a computer science student Mark Zuckerberg in 2004 alongside his college fellows Edwardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, Facebook is a privately owned website and has lately established itself as the leading social networking website of the world with a remarkable number of 750 million active users across the globe.
It enables it users to create their own profiles according to their own preferences and suitability. After designing such a quality offering the website was initially launched to cater a niche of Harvard students but later on the service not only expanded to other reputed colleges of United States of America such as Stanford University but with in no time Facebook emerged as the next big idea in town that hit the social networking arena like a bolt of lightning and dramatically changed the facet of this developing industry.
Today for a larger chunk of population, this particular social networking site has become an indispensible part of their daily life. For few it has now turned into an integral part of their routine job which they pursue to earn their livelihood. On the other hand it not only serves a significant tool to develop and maintain personal relationships, it also assists different people in constructing new business contacts as well.
Statement of the Marketing Goal
Analyzing the marketing goal of Facebook portrays a clear picture of a strategy that mainly rests upon providing its users a new degree or taking its customers to a new level of customization which they have never experienced before the launch of this innovative service.
Before the arrival of Facebook there were other social networking sites as well but those networking webs weren’t serving their customers with the kind of customization they were thriving for. Facebook did the magic for them through catering their different needs by introducing personalized settings.
Situation Analysis
Situation analysis of Facebook will comprise of an overview about its internal environment based upon the strengths and weaknesses of this social networking website.
Strengths
• First of all Facebook provides all it’s users a sense of ownership through their customized accounts.
• In a short-period of time Facebook has now become the market leader of the social networking industry
• It has earned an excellent reputation amongst its users
• According to the recent market surveys Facebook is 2nd leading website of the world
• Ranked 2nd amongst the fastest evolving and adopted website.
• It enjoys a competitive edge of more than 700 million active users on its site
• Ensures the customer embroilment exclusively at various personal levels
• A user friendly social networking system with one click facility to visit any body’s personal profile.
• Adding more to the customization feature, Facebook is a social networking system that caters it users with 70 different languages.
• The integrated Wall and minifeed aspect is also another factor that contributes largely to increasing popularity of Facebook.
• It takes a user’s personal relationships to a new level of virtual reality.
• Initially the website introduced its unique feature of sharing your personal pictures with your friends with only one click; later on the feature also enabled its members to share their videos on their friend’s wall easily.
• Privacy options also includes the restriction and total control over one’s own profile page, so that you can easily decide about a friend’s extent of access to your personalized account.
Weaknesses
• In order to consistently bring new and innovative changes to the Facebook, the social networking site is experiencing bugs after regular intervals of time
• The whole Facebook is personalized except for the portion where users are suppose to ask different questions regarding the service of this particular website as only frequently asked questions segment is there to entertain the queries of current users. So to entertain the queries of users a separate department should be established that should work 24/7 to improve the standard of this particular service
• The problem of flash animation banners has emerged as a nuisance for the frequent users; most of the users who regularly avail the service have found it quite distractive while performing the day to day activities on Facebook.
• Adding any kind of application on Facebook has now turned out to be a difficult task and spamming friends to add the same application is quite a feat to perform at this widely spread social network.
• Finding the right application for a user is also a time consuming job on Facebook, as most of the times users spent hours of searching in order to determine the right application for their own selves.
• Regarding the applications of Facebook a lot of users have found it annoying that too many irrelevant and useless applications on Facebook bug’s them consistently.
Target market Segments
Facebook is designed to cater almost each and every market segment of the society with its growing popularity now people form all age groups are displaying interest in using different applications of this attractive social network.
Marketing Mix of Facebook
Product
• For the first time a website has presented friends as a product, secondly they also provide you an efficient modern day messenger to communicate with you family and friends any where in the world.[sky]
• Other quality offerings of Facebook are games, groups, photos, pages, advertisement spaces.
• On different occasions such as Christmas, Eid, Independence Day celebrations and birthday’s people can send their loved ones or friends virtual gifts that are living in other countries through only spending a minimal amount of one dollar.
• Facebook has also presented itself as a vital platform for the upcoming web developers by facilitating them with social channels, authentications and open graph protocols.
• Facebook has also privileged its users to avail this social networking service even from their mobile phones this has enabled Facebook to generate more traffic and more clicks per second.
Price
• Facebook is free for all its users, but people using this social networking website are still paying some virtual cost related to it, inform of disclosing their personal information on this particular platform.
• Brand Advertising, Performance advertising, selling of virtual goods and most of all Microsoft advertising is currently serving as a major source of earnings for Facebook.
Place
• More than 700 million users are registered with Facebook and after successfully establishing its stronghold in the United States of America; the social networking site is on a course conquer the Asian region where the trend is new but spreading rapidly.
• Facebook has its availability across the globe and popular Egyptian revolution has also rendered the promotional features of Facebook.
Promotion
• Facebook has joined hands with Microsoft, Pandora and progressed according to a planned strategy, and has gained a lot of promotion by taking this measure, it has increased user number along with ads promotion on Facebook by different companies.
Main Strategies
Facebook is penetrating the market through introducing new services for people belonging to all societal classes and age groups.
For monitoring and control they have established a separate department that ensures the implementation of policies prescribed by the top management.
As far as the diversification of this social networking system is considered they are diversifying with changing trends of the market as they know that each day a user wants something new for their personal profiles
Budgets
Their financial budget can be well judged by their domain sales income of year 2011 in which they disclosed their earning of $8.5 million.
References
• David Articles. (2010). Official website: http://www.iandavidchapman.com/ Retrieved: 13th August 2011.
• MSDN Blogs. Official website: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/arpans/archive/2007/10/14/is-your-face-on-facebook.aspx Retrieved: 13th August 2011.
• Alexa. Official website: http://www.alexa.com/topsites Retrieved: 13th August 2011.
• Facebook press releases. Official website: http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics Retrieved: 13th August 2011.
• Marketing Mix; Facebook. Official website: https://marketingmixx.com/marketing-mix/155-facebook-marketing-mix.html Retrieved: 13th August 2011.
Hey Marketingmixx,
On a similar note,, Developing a Facebook marketing plan is not unlike developing an advertising plan for any other business. An exception is that this type of medium has the potential to reach a mass amount of people instantaneously. By using this site effectively individuals should see a growth in business.
Catch you again soon!