Many of early communication tools focused on bringing people together to interact with each other through chat rooms, and encouraged users to share personal information and ideas via personal webpages by providing easy-to-use publishing tools and free or inexpensive webspace. This also leads to the rapid increase in social networking sites'' popularity with big name such as MySpace is getting more page views than Google, or Facebook was launched in 2004 then became the largest social networking site in the world in early 2009. This report with aims to explore the Facebook’s service and provide some evidences of its performances as well as find out the ways to set up this kind of business in Vietnam to be successful.
Trang 1MASTER OF BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION
INTERNATIONAL PROGRAM
ASSIGNMENT
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY FOR MANAGERS
Submitted to: PhD Dr Pham Van Tai
Submitted by: Huynh Thi My Dieu
ID No.: CGSVN00014998
Class: MBAOUMM0313
Ho Chi Minh City, July 2013
Trang 3CHAPTER 1: OVERVIEW OF FACEBOOK.COM
Facebook.com was created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskivitz and Andrew McCollum, originally designed for college students with the name TheFacebook.com But from 2006, anyone who possesses a valid email address with over
13 years old could join Facebook It makes easily for users to connect and share with family and friends online and has even helped the web become more open and social Today, Facebook is the world's largest social networks and keeps growing for many years
to have 1.750 staffs and offices in 12 countries in early 2013
To explore Facebook, users must create a free account on the site Facebook requires new members to provide a valid e-mail address before completing registration After created an account, Facebook will ask new members answered a few questions about some general information such as work, education, etc After doing so, Facebook will generate a profile for new member
Picture 1.1: Facebook Homepage to log in/ sign up
Trang 4Here are general steps to create an account on Facebook for personal use:
Figure 1.1: Steps to create an account at Facebook.com
After these above simple steps, The Welcome to Facebook Page will appear Then Facebook will send you an email to confirm about your registration Before you can access all of Facebook's features, you will need to confirm your email address
To create a Facebook page, we have to choose one of six categories including:
- Local Business or Place
- Company, organization or Institution
Find yours Friends (Can skip this step)
Add information about yourself such as education, employment, etc (You also can skip this step if you want to keep them privately)
Add your Profile picture (Upload available picture of yours or take a photo from webcam – You can skip this step if you are not ready to show your profile picture)
Click Save and Continue
Trang 5Picture 1.2: Six Categories of creating a page on Facebook
Facebook is offering various applications to write personal blogs, share images, video and stories in social communities It also supports e-marketing and offers many services to worldwide marketers
1.3.1 For individual: create profile with photos, lists of personal interests, contact information, and other personal information; communicate with friends and other users through private or public messages and a chat feature; Join, “like” or run common interest groups or pages (organized by business or brand)
1.3.2 For organization: advertise across the platform to run a page and promote their products or services
In summarize Facebook’s products/ services can be listed as the following table:
- People can like or comment on what they see
- Each news feed of user is personalized based on their interests
September
2006
Trang 6and the sharing activity of their friends
September
2011
Graph
Search
- A structured search tool that lets people use simple phrases like
“Photos of my friends in Vietnam” to find people, places, photos and other information shared with them on Facebook
- When turned on, Graph Search replaces the search bar at the top of every page of Facebook
Messages
- Allow to send messages, emails, chats, and text messages together in one ongoing conversation whether they’re chatting
on the web or texting on the go
- Messages are organized by conversations with friends or groups of friends
high It’s easy to add details like captions, locations and tags Tagging lets people identify a friend in a photo or video, easily sharing that content with them
- When someone likes a page, they will see updates from that page in news feed
- When someone likes or comments on a page post, that activity may be shared with their friends, increasing the page’s exposure and reach
November
2007
Platform - It enables developers to build social apps, websites and devices
Apps
- Enable people to connect with their friends, whether it’s through playing a game, watching a movie, sharing their favorite restaurant, or listening to a song
- New social apps that integrate with Facebook are emerging on phones, through websites and within Facebook
Social - Social plugins help developers and publishers drive growth and
Trang 7Plugins engagement for their websites with a single line of code
- For example, social plugins allow people to easily share interesting content with their Facebook friends through News Feed Examples include:
• Like Button: people can share a web page or a piece of content
with their friends in one click
• Subscribe Button: people can follow their favorite public
figures in one click
• Comments Plugin: people can easily comment on articles, see
the most relevant comments and share their comments with friends on Facebook
• Single Sign On Registration Plugin: People be able to login
without having to fill in registration forms or remember another user name and password
Sponsored
Stories
- Marketers can amplify the distribution of stories that people have already shared with their friends
- For example, when someone posts on Facebook that they have
“checked-in” at a restaurant, their friends may see that in their News Feeds The restaurant can purchase sponsored stories to increase the distribution of that story to the person’s friends
- Sponsored stories also enable marketers to promote stories to people that have liked their Facebook Page
Table 1.1: Facebook’s products and services
Picture 1.3: Examples of Apps on Facebook
1.4 Payment:
Facebook offers an easy way for people to buy digital and virtual goods in apps on Facebook such as premium items in games or video-on-demand movies Payment options
Trang 8include credit and debit cards, PayPal, mobile payments, gift cards and numerous local payment options around the world In 2010, Facebook’s payment system charged a 30% fee to publishers of Facebook applications for virtual goods transactions
People can store their payment information on Facebook in a trusted environment and then make purchases across a range of apps without having to re-enter their payment information in each app Using Facebook’s payment infrastructure, developers can focus
on building great games and apps rather than having to build their own payment and deceit management systems
1.5 Link the Website’s service to other ones:
People can Share, Like or Search on other websites that integrate with Facebook
whenever they see display image of Facebook Other integration activities from Facebook such as:
• Like buttons: update Facebook profile when clicked
• Activity button: show what friends are doing on the site
• Like box: view Facebook Page stream from website
• Website Login/ Registration authentication through Facebook
Trang 9Picture 1.4: Facebook’s integration with the website Mashable
Facebook create opportunity for developers Open Graph API and Social Plugins that they can use to build different experiences for users, including Apps on Facebook, Desktop Apps, Mobile Apps, and Platform-integrated websites For example, Facebook users can publish Facebook Status Updates on Twitter and publish Tweets on Facebook
Picture 1.5: Example of Integration between Facebook with Tweet and Twitter
On Facebook, a public profiles that let artists, public figures, businesses, brands, organizations, and non-profits create a presence and connect with the Facebook community It comes to the results that when someone likes or comments on a page post, that activity may be shared with their friends, increasing the page’s exposure and reach
In terms of its partners, Facebook has linked connection with many companies in different services such as Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, Washington Post providing online movies, TV shows, music, and news At the end of March 2012, more than 9 million apps and websites integrated with Facebook
Trang 10CHAPTER 2: FACEBOOK’S BUSINESS MODEL
2.1 Business Model
Facebook follows Advertising E-business Model for earning revenues in exchange for
displaying advertisements on its website Facebook draws the attention of millions of users which is a mine stone for advertisers targeting a particular market segment Facebook relies on an old internet business model: display ads The good news for Facebook is there
is a lot of room to target ads more effectively and put ads in more places
A Consumer - to - Consumer (C2C) business model is one of model in which firms facilitate the exchange of data directly between its users over the internet, providing a platform to load text, images, music/ video files, etc for sharing among users This platform for sharing and interaction has a commercial aspect with the aid of advertising Distinguishing itself from the conventional media, social networking sites like Facebook keep its users with unique designs and sponsored online content According to Canzer, the level of traffic to a particular website acts as a tool to understand how appealing the site is to its users, its effectiveness in its brand awareness and an attraction to marketers and advertisers
(StudyMode.com, 2008)
Facebook also incorporates community e-business model which is an e-business model built around the notion that a group of online users can be regularly brought to a common platform Facebook successfully makes communities within its own community Even the Facebook users form an part of the virtual brand or community of Facebook users in contrast to users of other sites such as MySpace Within this virtual community lie thousands of other communities built by users, band groups, advertisers, etc
2.2 How Facebook’s Business model work:
The Mission of Facebook is to open and connect the world It has built a Multi-sided Platform (MSP) that serves different customer segments with different value propositions Advertisers can further engage their audience by incorporating social context into their ads such as displaying when someone’s friend has liked an advertiser’s Facebook Page The website also helps users stay connected with their friends, families, and colleagues as well
as to discovers and learns more about what is going on in the world People express themselves by sharing their opinions, ideas, photos, and activities
Trang 11Figure 2.1: Facebook’s Business Model
Facebook creates a unique combination of Reach, Relevance, Social Context, and Engagement to the advertisers They can engage with users based on the information such
as Age, Gender, Location, Education, Work history or specific Interests which are shared
by users Facebook offers advertisers an ability to include social context in their Ads that social context highlights a user’s connections with a brand or business Businesses can also create Facebook Pages to engage with interested customers and simulate an ongoing dialog with them
Developers benefit from tools and APIs which are created by Facebook that enables them
to easily integrate with Facebook Developers can use Facebook platform to build apps and websites that are more personalized, social, and engaging Facebook offers developers an online payment infrastructure that enables developers to receive payments from the users
in an easy-to-use and secure environment
Besides that Facebook is investing heavily into Facebook-owned data centers This is to support user growth, increased user engagement, and delivery of new products Currently,
Trang 12data centers of Facebook store more than 100 petabytes (100 quadrillion bytes) of photos and videos This is going to increase further in the future since people engage more on Facebook To support these massive storage and computing needs, Facebook custom designed and built their software, servers, and data centers from the ground up Furthermore, in order to growth the user engagement, Facebook has partnered with companies such as Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, Washington Post providing online movies, TV shows, music, and news which help users share what they are watching, listening, or reading with their friends and family
On 9th April 2012, Facebook made a decision to buy Instagram for $1 Billion Instagram is application of sharing photos that allows its users to apply digital filters to the photos and then share them on different social networking services Since then, the results from applying Instagram are impressive: 30 million+ Registered Users; 1 billion+ Photos Uploaded; 5 million+ Photos Per Day; 575 Likes Per Second (about 50 Million Likes per Day); 81 Comments Per Second (about 7 Million Comments per Day)
2.3 Competitors:
There are majority of International competitors with Facebook such as Google (in terms of Pageview and display ads), Youtube (for advertising), Google+, Twitler, MySpace, Yahoo (about social connection), etc
Source: Social Media Influence.com Table 2.1: Top 20 websites ranked by Visits by 2010
Trang 13Facebook is ranked at top for traffic and Google narrowly edges out Facebook in terms of traffic share, with Gmail the one property that puts Google over the top Looking further down the Top 10 list, the only thing keeping Yahoo even remotely competitive in the competition for eyeballs is Yahoo Mail The same could be said of Microsoft Its Windows Live Mail is keeping it barely in the game
Success of Google because of two major innovations: their core search product, and their keyword advertising business model Some estimates put Google’s search revenues per page views at 100-200x Facebook’s Google has over 350 million users using Gmail Over
250 million photos get uploaded on Facebook daily Over 4 million businesses use Google Apps for Business Over 4 billion videos are streamed on Youtube everyday
In Vietnam, the social networking Sites which provide same services as Facebook including Zingme.vn, Truongxua.vn, Banbe.net, Tamtay.vn, etc Zingme.vn closely resembles Facebook, which recently overtook the Vietnamese site in subscriber numbers Facebook
is sometimes blocked by the government because of fears it could be used to mobilize dissent against its one-party rule Zingme.vn is never blocked, and is more popular with younger, less educated Vietnamese Companies and institutions often have accounts on both The embassy has more than 18,000 friends on Zingme.vn, compared to 12,000 on Facebook (Thenextweb.com, 2013)
Table 2.2: Top 5 social networks in Vietnam While Vietnamese can still access the social network with relative ease which has led to the restriction policy being called the Bamboo, in reference to China’s Great Fire Wall, Facebook does not dominate in Vietnam A recent report showed that local