Analysis And Evaluation Of Facebook’s Marketing Strategies

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Question

Aim

The purpose of this assignment is to again provide you with an opportunity to apply knowledge, theory, frameworks and tools from the early part of the unit to an analysis of the strategy and strategic practices of a real organisation. In this assignment, you will work to analyse the strategies pursued by Facebook since its creation. You will evaluate marketing-related strategies and their effectiveness and relate those real-life experiences to relevant research and theory. The aim is to provide experience of marketing analysis and practice and to determine your ability to relate real marketing strategy to theory and research.

The Overall Task

Facebook Inc is a global online social network that has about one billion member accounts. However the organisation is less than 10 years old. Despite intense media excitement when Facebook listed as a public company in May 2012, the share price has bobbed around quite a bit since. Many business analysts are beginning to question the company's long-term viability because it is difficult to discern a coherent business strategy.

Your task in this case analysis is to answer two questions by critically analysing Facebook's history, resources and market situation. Please do not just describe events, although you should read Facebook's history to understand the background to your analysis. You should use the principles and concepts that you have learned throughout the unit to answer the following three questions:

What marketing strategy or strategies has Facebook adopted since it was created? Answer this question by applying one or more of the theoretical approaches discussed in the course.
What marketing options can you describe for Facebook if it wishes to remain a successful organisation throughout the next decade? Answer this question based on the circumstances that exist in 2014 and your best forecasts of relevant future industry factors.

These are wide-ranging questions and you should undertake extensive independent research into Facebook and its industry. You should explore different aspects of these issues and incorporate them into your report. This is a practical assessment of a real company, but you need to show an understanding of theory and research in your evaluation and suggestions.

Process

Begin to gather information about Facebook and its marketing-related strategies. There are a range of sources you can make use including the company's own corporate website and related publications, academic journals, business press and media, blogs and so on. The quality business press such as Forbes or Business Week or the Economist are in some ways good places to start.
However, you need to begin to study relevant course materials as the task requires you to analyse and evaluate Facebook's marketing strategy in relation to theory, frameworks and research.
Consider each of the two questions carefully and begin to relate practice to theory in an attempt to answer each of them. The questions explicitly direct you to specific aspects of the unit material and to specific types of models, tools and theories.
It should be clear that there is no definitive right answer here. This also mirrors reality, in that companies are not able to find a single solution or pathway; they have to make difficult choices from alternatives. In the light of that try to explore different aspects of the two questions – there are no 'correct' answers and lots of valid arguments for and against all kinds of alternatives. The merits of your argument will depend to a large extent on how much evidence you can cite to support your point of view; that is why this is called a research project.
Write up your analysis. This should be in a report format. Here is a suggested structure: a. Executive Summary
Introduction
Background to the Company
Marketing Analysis
The Nature of Facebook's Marketing Strategy or Strategies since it began. ii. Strategic Marketing Options for Facebook moving forward
Conclusion
References
Appendix

Ensure that you have related the real conditions of the company to theory and research and that you have read, cited and referenced appropriate academic material as well as more popular sources (which also need to be properly referenced).

Submit the report via the Turnitin Submission Link (under Assessment Details on the Blackboard site)…be fully aware of the plagiarism rules in the School; plagiarism will not be tolerated.
The marking criteria for the assignment can be found on the following page. They are published to give you detailed guidelines about the way in which your mark will be calculated. Please read them carefully. Note that they are a guide, not a definitive formula for allocating marks, and no set of criteria can accurately describe every possible assignment. Your final mark will reflect the application of academic judgement by your marker to your whole assignment.

Solution

This report is a critical analysis of various aspects of marketing strategies that are adopted by the well known social media platform Facebook. The main aim of this report is to analyse the marketing strategies adopted by Facebook to be successful in this era and by analysing the changing trends in coming years in social media what new marketing strategies, it should adopt to maintain its successful position. Facebook is social networking site that mainly works on the platform development so as to offer the user's different social networking functions mainly to the students as well as the group advertisers. Facebook has also cooperated with third party application developers as well as other business partners for improving its content along with features. The network environment provided by it is very trustworthy and meaningful. After analysing the business model adopted by Facebook from various aspects like customer relationship development, financial aspects , product innovation, market considerations and infrastructure management few recommendations have also been suggested for further development of Facebook in future.

1. Introduction

During the recent decade millions of internet users all across the globe have joined social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram etc. Be it male, female, children, elders, well educated, or non-educated everyone is using and talks about social media. With the rising popularity of social media in the past decade this report analyses the popularity of Facebook Inc. It has emerged as a global social online network that has more than one billion member accounts, although it is just 10 years old. This report critically analyses Facebook's history, the resources as well as the current market situation. Then the theoretical aspects are used for analysing the marketing strategies adopted by Facebook and how the changing media trends will affect the popularity of Facebook in coming years (SIkka, 2014).

In most of the cases it is seen that the social media sites like YouTube, Facebook, Orkut, LinkedIn, Bebo, Twitter , and MySpace etc. do not charge even a single penny for registration. Currently these social media platforms are working towards improving their supervise features and their amount of users are also growing very rapidly. Because of most of the services going free, these sites are largely unable to generate satisfying revenues and profits as desired and that is commensurate to the popularity of the sites (Miltiadis, et al., 2009). Thus through this report we will analysis what all factors and changes in its marketing strategy should Facebook bring about to survive successfully in future.

1.1Background of Facebook

Amongst the categories of social media Facebook falls into the Social networks category that focuses on content sharing, maintaining relationships and provides a tool for networking. In February, 2004 , a well known social networking site called Facebook was created and launched in US by Mark Zucherberg. Currently, it is ranked 2nd most popular social media site all across the globe, followed by the search site Google according to Aelxa traffic rankings (Miller, 2011). As per the official statistics given by the company Facebook, it has a huge base of users that is more than 500 million actively using this platform, along with this it provides more than 70 translations on the site itself. More than 70 percent of the users of Facebook are from outside US. The site boasts of entrepreneurs and developers that come from above 190 countries that grow and build with the effective platform of Facebook. There are more than 2.5 million websites that have integrated with the unique platform like Facebook (Kessler, 2012).

Being a social networking site Facebook is used mainly for social utility that helps in connecting people , maintaining connection with friends , uploading photos, sharing videos and links and for exchanging messages. The Facebook users can also join common interest user groups that can be organised into workplace, schools, other communities or colleges, etc. The fundamental feature that creates an experience on Facebook is the person's Profile Page and the Homepage (Miller, 2010). Facebook has numerous core features that are available through which the users can interact with each other, for example, 'The Wall', The Message board on Profile Page that permits the users and friends as well to post personal messages that other users cannot see, 'Gift' for sending virtual gifts to families and friends, using 'Pokes' the users can poke each other and it can be done by clicking on the poke icon for interaction with friends, ' Status' for showing the exact actions they are doing currently and the whereabouts of the user; ' Events' for showing or informing about the users online and offline activities. In 2007 Facebook opened the platform for third party application developers. This helped in interacting with many brilliant applications with Facebook platform that helps in extending the core features as well as functionalities of Facebook in a tremendous manner. Currently Facebook runs more than 24,000 applications that are developed by over 400,000 experts and approximately 140 applications are being published every day (Facebook Press, 2011).