A Profile of Facebook

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Social media nowadays are bombarding people’s lives whether it is Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, LinkedIn, Orkut, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Groupon, and many more. Social media has changed how people interact with each other and how they express themselves on the Internet. Facebook, for example, has really altered people’s perception of themselves. We hypothesize that this altered perception in turn influences their behavior on product choices and involvement with particular groups.

Facebook Background

As of now, Facebook is the most trafficked social media site with over 600 million users in the United States and countries worldwide. It exceeded MySpace in January 2009 and has 58% of its users outside of the United States. It has indeed expanded a lot over the years. Initially, it was only created for the United States but has extended to other countries and now targets almost anyone and not just high school and college students.

On February 4, 2004 Facebook was created by 19-year-old Harvard sophomore, Mark Zuckerberg. It initially started as Facemash in 2003, where students were allowed to compare two students and see who was “hotter”. Zuckerberg started Facemash with Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, two of Zuckerberg’s fellow classmates, along with financial help from Eduardo Saverin. It went through Harvard administration but was quickly denied for invading the privacy of students. But in 2004 was recreated using the name The Facebook. The Facebook was really well received by Harvard students when it first came out. “In August 2005, The Facebook was officially called Facebook and the domain facebook.com was purchased for a reported $200,000” (Yadav). Even with all this success, Facebook has undergone many controversies....

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... statuses, join groups, attend events, post photos , and write notes. These features help users feel validated by their friends and others they connect with. They foster a sense of connectedness and belonging, while also contributing to users’ overall feeling of positivism about themselves, and thus to their sense of individuality. Companies take advantage of these human to human feelings of validation and connectedness to instead establish a community around their products, which within themselves carry their own sense of validation, with the hope that some of those positive feelings would be transferred to their brand. The traditional Facebook marketing model is create a page, establish a sense of community, then enlist the support of a celebrity . Yet we found that companies who creatively venture away from this model, can also be successful as seen by Old Spice.

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