By contributor Sean Carey
I have a confession to make: I don’t have a Facebook page. A few years ago I was encouraged to sign up by friends and colleagues when Facebook was primarily used by university students and lecturers. I resisted on the grounds that I was busy enough. I also reckoned that I knew enough people. In any case, if I wanted new friends and acquaintances it was best to meet them face-to-face.
I now realize that I am in a very small minority. A few weeks ago I asked a group of undergraduate students, aged between 19 and 34, how many had Facebook accounts. All of them put their hands up. Then I enquired whether any of them had accounts which had lapsed. It turned out that all of them had live accounts. This led me to ask how many in the class had used Facebook that day. All the students reported that they had logged on at least once before attending the lecture, which began at 11 AM.
I was intrigued. Although the group of students, mainly from the Greater London area, are not representative of the age (or social class) cohort within the general U.K. population, the fact that around 20 students in the lecture room were committed Facebook users is indicative of an extraordinary social phenomenon – the recent emergence of diverse social media platforms in connecting individuals – sometimes friends sometimes strangers – with one another.
A few days later, I wasn’t at all surprised to learn that Facebook has 900 million users worldwide and made a profit of around $1 billion in 2011. Social media is definitely here to stay.
So what to make of the news that Facebook has just raised the price at which it will make an entry into the Nasdaq Stock Market on Friday from $28-$35 to $34–$38, which will value the company at over $100 billion?
Certainly, the growth in value of Facebook, which only launched in 2004, is extraordinary by historical standards, especially when compared to companies operating in the manufacturing sector. Furthermore, a high-tech brand that has managed to keep growing while other social media sites like Bebo and MySpace have fallen by the wayside must be doing something right.
So is it down to good luck or good management? The latter I would say, especially because in the development phase in 2003 when it was known as Facemash, the social networking site developed by Zuckerberg, while he was a student at Harvard, was in competition with very similar services that were being created by contemporaries at other universities in the U.S.
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