Sunday, August 18, 2013

The Rising Stars of Social Networking


 
Facebook is the most dominant social network has more than 1.11 billion active users and over 680 million mobile users. Facebook users spend more than 700 billion minutes every month on the website. While the broad user base and social graph give Facebook a huge advantage, the company still does not have a solid revenue generation model and faces intense competition for online ad sales. For instance, the channel attribution problem is still a major issue and the social advertising model is still viewed with skepticism by many marketers.As such, the barriers to entry in the sector are limited and Facebook’s current advantage is its scale. 

There are other emerging starts in this market who's fortunes are rising rapidly. Video and photo-sharing social networking platforms such as Pintrest and Youtube which have been experiencing rapid growth. Pintrest is experiencing the highest growth rates among Social Networking platforms and Youtube gets in excess of a billion unique visitors a month. These platform pose a serious challenge to Facebook and will compete with Facebook in getting a bigger share of the social advertising dollars. To stay relevant, Facebook has to keep innovating and expand its services as it related to video and photo-sharing services and try to develop more tangible and measurable performance metrics for demonstrating the ROI on Facebook advertising. Facebook’s purchase of the photo-sharing service Instagram is a step in the right direction and will help the firm to stay competitive in the space, but needs more than an aggressive M&A strategy to sustain its dominance of the Social Network market. Facebook also has to drastically improve its user’s perception of Facebook’s lax privacy policies and settings as this could severely undermine its credibility as a secure platform.

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