FACEBOOK

Facebook

Facebook

Executive Summary

Electronic commerce is certainly not a brand new concept, but what is new is the inclusion of the virtual market, to social networks. Facebook, being the largest community in the Web 2.0 world, has been performing like an amazing platform to develop this model, with living examples of several successful online businesses, housed in the large network. Companies eager to experience the best technological developments and applications of E-commerce, believe that Facebook is a perfect commercial habitat.

Introduction

Facebook is an easy to use application and providing value to users. In their book 'Net Gain', Armstrong & Hagel, 1997, believe that communities that can meet the multiple needs of users will provide the most value, and thus be the most successful (Hayes and Miller 2010 95). As a platform, Facebook has multiple products and applications that address different needs of users and might also explain part of growth and popularity of the network of users (Product Overview a-Facebook). Darlington (2010), also notes that a successful online community allows participants to have a forum to share common interests, develop meaningful dialogue, and instill a sense of belonging and codes of behaviour and in order for the online community to remain cohesive and give value to the members there needs to be regular consumer to consumer participation. This paper discusses usefulness of facebook in business.

Discussion

As a platform Facebook can aggregate users in many different ways, and it's the aggregation of users that makes communities valuable. Facebook groups allow users with similar passions and interests to connect together and can be used by businesses and companies for marketing, branding and messaging purposes, as electronics company Apple and fashion retailer H&M have attempted. The groups can be private, where only invited members are able to see the group, or more commonly made public and can be created by any user of Facebook, though once created and a member has joined, the group cannot be disbanded.

Companies forming groups for commercial purposes needs to think very carefully about possible consequences, as they may surrender control of some of the content of the group to the members; however the official administrator (group creator) does have control over members, and can publish or un-publish the area of the group where members can make comments. Past research has looked into the questions on how brand communities and social networks can be influenced by marketers. Facebook groups is a relatively new application on the Internet, since 2004, and currently there doesn't exist any statistics on the popularity of user searches for groups, neither any research on how effective the groups are for marketing and branding purposes.

Throughout Facebook there are approximately 25 million active user groups (Statistics- Facebook April 2009), and a search on Facebook groups using the keyword 'PADI' brings up over 500 results, however, on the first page of 10 results, there are 5 groups with PADI within the group name, and one group has 22000+ members, the second with just under 4000 members, and the other three with ...