Facebook Facts

Facebook was the creation of a Harvard student and quickly became one of the most visited online communities around the world. As technology developed, increased number of applications began to be introduced on Facebook, bringing even more enthusiasts of different ages, gender or race.

Zuckerberg knows this is a crucial moment for the company he founded five years ago in his Harvard room. He must figure out how to continue to add new members and make Facebook vital to its mass audience without upsetting the kids and early adopters who helped popularize the site.

But nowadays people passionately updating their Facebook pages aren't just tech-savvy kids, college and post-college crowd the site originally aimed to serve (18 to 24 year olds) now makes up less than a quarter of users. The newest members - the ones behind Facebook's accelerating growth rate - are more, mature types, who never thought they'd have the time or inclination to share on the web. It's just that Facebook has finally started to make their busy lives a little more productive - and a lot more fun.

Facebook is the best medium to organize people with similar interests. You always have the option to organize them either in pages or in groups. In present times it is also becoming a platform for business people to launch their marketing campaigns.

Facebook pages and groups help in clear launching of the marketing campaigns. However, there is a quite a difference between these two. The pages allow a business owner or an organization or a public figure to broadcast their messages to their fans while groups are best for short-term projects. Marketers may find it difficult to choose as both would work for an effective marketing campaign. Consequently, in order to take a clear decision marketers are opting for Facebook pages than the groups.

Try logging in to quickly check a message, and you may find yourself scrolling through new baby photos from that guy who used to sit next in the high school. And how'd he find you here anyhow? Soon you're checking the friends you have in common. This addictive quality keeps Facebook's typical user on the site for an average of 170 minutes a month.. Compare that with Google News, where the average reader spends 13 minutes a month checking up on the world, or the New York Times website, which holds on to readers for only 10 minutes a month.

The "stickiness" of the site is a key part of 24-year-old CEO Mark Zuckerberg's original plan to build an online version of the relationships we have in real life. Facebook lets us find friends, review photos with our family, join fun clubs and do all that in digital form. Yet we also present different faces to the different people in our lives: An "anything goes" page we share with pals might not be appropriate for office mates - or for the moms and grandmas who increasingly are joining the site. Basic privacy allows users to share and control various degrees of information with friends.

Many seem to have just lost their appetite for Facebook, they just stopped wanting to look at other people’s photos and résumés and updates, or have their own subject to scrutiny. Some ex-users seemed shaken, even heartbroken, by their breakups with Facebook. One guy said "I primarily left Facebook because I was wasting so much time on it". And some believe their privacy is compromised.

In February 2009, when Facebook updated its terms, it deleted a provision that said users could remove their content at any time, at which time the license would expire. Further, it added new language that said Facebook would retain users’ content and licenses after an account was terminated.

After a wave of protests from its users, Facebook said that it would withdraw changes to its terms of service. Mr. Zuckerberg said that Facebook’s next revision of terms would reflect "a new approach" and would be "a substantial revision from where we are now."
Recently Facebook has changed a lot of the opportunities and challenges for marketing through Facebook Pages, Facebook Groups, and circulating content from your website or blog through Facebook Connect, and is now reviving the News Feed instead of just the Live Feed that features mostly Status Updates. This change gives you the chance to expand the viral marketing potential of your Facebook Page, if you add fans and engage them in a way that gets them to interact with your content effectively.

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