Marketing
Facebook’s mission is to achieve an open and connected world. Millions of people frequent Facebook to investigate the activities taking place in the world, and stay connected with family and friends. This connectedness improves sharing and expression. Developers take advantage of the platform created by Facebook to build applications and develop websites aimed at reaching the wide global network of users. This supports the development of social and personalized products. This makes it possible for marketers to engage with over a billion active users. The platform offered by the company offers subsets of users by effectively utilizing information provided by users such as age, gender, interests, and location (Freis et al. 2013).
Facebook’s strategic marketing objectives include enabling faster and broader communication between people by expanding the horizon created by being an integral component of users’ lives (Fewkes et al. 2012). The strategies that the company applies in achieving the objectives include creating value for users by enabling connections and sharing with friends, offering a discovering and learning platform, promoting an expression platform where users can publish opinions, and ensuring that users stay connected everywhere. The company’s product development approach avails useful tools that promote sharing and discovery through mobile devices and computers. Specifically, the use of timeline makes it possible for people to organize and develop displays for important activities and events. The effect is creating a chronological and searchable personal narrative that is full of memories. Facebook’s strategy includes a personalized news feed which makes up a key feature in a person’s homepage and allows for regular updating through the person’s network. The photos and videos profile provides for the creation of photo albums, and the possibility of uploading unlimited number of high resolution photos which are shareable within the user’s network. The messaging profile includes emailing, chatting, and texting. The easy to use service optimizes the delivery of messages through the devise the customer is using to access Facebook. It is possible to set up a free Facebook email address. The chat service makes it possible to send instant messages to friends. Text messaging service allows for the integration of chat and text messages and creates a conversation trail.
Facebook’s strategies are consistent with the corporation’s mission, objectives, and are responsive to the internal and external operational environment. The performance of the company is phenomenal with over 600 daily active users (DAUs), over I billion monthly active users (MAUs), and over 150 billion friend connections. The company also acquired Instagram and consequently brought on board over 100 million photo-sharing service users. The company has also made and sold a number of new applications for smart devices (Fewkes et al. 2012).
Operations and Logistics
Facebook Corporation primarily deals with the provision of services, and as a result it does not have a manufacturing strategy. At the service provision level, the company deals with developers and marketers. The company has an elaborate strategy of creating value for desired services. The platform consists of application programming interfaces (APIs) and tools that provide support to developers by enabling the integration process with Facebook through the creation of social applications and websites. The particular tools and APIs include growth, engagement, and monetization. Growth is provided through enabling developers to access the available user base and channels of distribution including News Feed and App Center to improve traffic flow to their websites and apps. Engagement is provided through making it possible for Platform developers to come up with personalized and social products offering improved methods for users to share and interact with friends with the use of mobile devices. Monetization is achieved through offering online payments infrastructure that makes it possible for Platform developers to facilitate their transactions in a secure environment (Nishtala et. Al 2013).
The principal units of the application features open graph, social plugins, and payments. Open graph includes apps and websites enabling users to share and express themselves by sharing information regarding movies, songs, and books. Social plugins include the Like button , and are characterized by features that are available to developers for integration with websites and provide personalized and engaging social experiences. Payments are provided through an online infrastructure that facilitates the receipt of payments by developers.
Facebook enables marketers to create value by presenting a specific combination of relevance, social context, and vast reach. The different kinds of marketers include brand marketers, medium sized entrepreneurs, and direct marketers. Reach is enhanced by offering vast consumer audience since marketers can access over 1 billion MAUs. Relevance applies having access to regularly updated user demographics provided by Facebook. Social context offered implies that recommendations emanating from friends have a strong bearing on purchase decisions and user interests. Marketing messages that factor in the social contexts provided by Facebook have a greater chance of reaping the benefits associated with friends’ connections and interaction with particular brands or business. Engagement involves a friendly web that offers new opportunities for enterprises to communicate with each other or with potential and existing customers. A number of Facebook products present an interactive platform for marketers to communicate with users. It is emphasized that a brand or even a business can achieve enhanced presence on the web by creating a landing page on Facebook. Through the pages, products are given opportunities to establish direct and sustained relationships with current and potential clients. Once these customers are gained, they can form valuable advocates for the brand since once a user “Likes” a page, the Page owner can initiate publishing ongoing stories to the persons News Feed (Fletcher 2010).
There are tools and products that Facebook offers to marketers so as to present a unique combination of relevance, environment, and reach. These include Facebook Ads, Facebook Ad System, and Facebook Insights and Ad Analytics. Facebook Ads, which include sponsored stories, direct users to intended content either on a destination website or on a Facebook page. Facebook Ad System involves the creation of an ad campaign on Facebook that involves selection of the users through provided demographics. Facebook Insights and Ad Analytics are used in the tracking and optimization of campaigns, and make it possible for marketers to attain knowledge and information concerning displayed and identified ads (Fletcher 2010).
Human Resource Management
In spite of the phenomenal growth reported by Facebook, the company does not employ many workers. By close of the year that ended December 31, 2015, Facebook had 12,691 employees (Thusoo et al. 2010). The company is easily identified through its association with hacker culture that involves a working atmosphere of rewarding creative problem solving leading to fast decision-process. Facebook’s philosophy promotes staff to be exceptionally proactive and courageous. It upholds a culture ensures that every worker is informed, and encourages people to be mobile and focused on solving problems they consider as important. The company encourages small work teams that are able to apply speed in the development of products and addressing customer needs. Interestingly, the company posts promotional messages meant to motivate staff on its workplace boards as a constant reminder of the connectedness required in moving towards achieving its mission (Thusoo et al. 2010).
The company has a robust employee performance and appraisal system that allows for open and interactive process aimed at enhancing employee performance by highlighting what the employee feels should be done. The company values its workforce and claims that the entrepreneurial journey that has made it one of the best performing companies in recent years is attributed to loyal and hardworking employees. It is reported that the company applies an employee compensation mechanism that is responsive to both company and workers’ needs. Concerning managing employee diversity, the company is predominately composed of relatively young employees. This has the implied advantage of working with a generation that embraces modernity and regards diversity as contributing to strength. To display this perspective, the company reports minimal staff turnover, and is listed as one of the leading employers.
Facebook offers internal growth opportunities to its employees. This is considered to be an effective strategy since growing own employees ensures that company culture is upheld. When employees work in an environment that has “close to home feeling” there is nurturing of working relationships, and the bonding process reduces staff turnover and improves staff morale. The strategic direction envision in the company’s mission of an open and connected world, is considered to be the foundation for anchoring plans and growth strategies for a company that appears to be prepared to weather the dynamics in its field.
References
Fewkes, A. M., & McCabe, M. (2012). Facebook: Learning tool or distraction?. Journal of Digital Learning in Teacher Education, 28(3), 92-98.
Fletcher, D. (2010). How Facebook is redefining privacy.
Freis, S. D., & Gurung, R. A. (2013). A Facebook analysis of helping behavior in online bullying. Psychology of popular media culture, 2(1), 11.
Nishtala, R., Fugal, H., Grimm, S., Kwiatkowski, M., Lee, H., Li, H. C., & Stafford, D. (2013). Scaling memcache at facebook. In Presented as part of the 10th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 13) (pp. 385-398).
Thusoo, A., Shao, Z., Anthony, S., Borthakur, D., Jain, N., Sen Sarma, J., & Liu, H. (2010, June). Data warehousing and analytics infrastructure at facebook. In Proceedings of the 2010 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of data (pp. 1013-1020). ACM.
