Facebook has over 500 million active users and is one of the largest social networking sites in the world. It started in 2004 among Harvard students and now has widespread global use. The site generates most of its revenue from advertising and allows businesses to create pages and advertise to targeted demographics. While offering opportunities, Facebook still needs more integration of pages and applications to fully realize its potential for businesses.

2. social networking site

3. Some facts
1. Facebook has over 500 million active users. With more than 55 million status
updates each day.
2. More than 2.5 billion pictures are uploaded to Facebook each month.
3. The average Facebook user has 130 friends and sends eight friend requests per
month.
4. A recent survey of 500 top colleges found that 10% of admissions officers
acknowledged looking at social networking sites such as Facebook to evaluate
applicants. 38% of admissions officers said that what they saw negatively affected the
applicants.
5. Facebook is not only beating MySpace traffic, but it is also the second-ranked site
overall in the U.S. behind Google.
6. If Facebook were a country, it would be the 3rd-largest country in the world, after
China, India.

4. 7. There are more than 800,000 developers building applications for Facebook.
8. Farmville boasts more than 60 million players on Facebook. Zynga—the maker of
Farmville, Mafia Wars, and other Facebook games—boasts an annual revenue of more
than $200 million.

5. Description
• Facebook is one of the largest websites in the world, with more than
500 million monthly users
• Since September 2006, anyone over the age of 13 with a valid e-
mail address can join Facebook.
• The website's membership was initially limited by the founders to
Harvard students.
• A January 2009, a Compete.com study ranked Facebook as the most
used social network by worldwide monthly active users, followed
by MySpace. Entertainment Weekly put it on its end-of-the-decade
"best-of" list, saying, "How on earth did we stalk our exes,
remember our co-workers' birthdays, bug our friends, and play a
rousing game of Scrabulous before Facebook?" Quantcast estimates
Facebook has 135.1 million monthly unique U.S. visitors.

6. History
Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and
fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris
Hughes
Initialy named as Facemash were student photo are rated.
On October 24, 2007, Microsoft announced that it had purchased a 1.6% share
of Facebook for $240 million, giving Facebook a total implied value of around
$15 billion.
Traffic to Facebook has increased steadily since 2009. More people visited
Facebook than Google.com for the week ending March 13, 2010.
Facebook has also become the top social network across eight individual markets
in the region, Philippines, Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, New
Zealand, Hong Kong and Vietnam, while other brands commanded the top
positions in certain markets, including Google-owned Orkut in India, Mixi.jp in
Japan, CyWorld in South Korea and Yahoo!’s Wretch.cc in Taiwan.

7. company
Most of Facebook's revenues comes from advertising. Microsoft is Facebook's
exclusive partner for serving banner advertising, and as such Facebook only
serves advertisements that exist in Microsoft's advertisement inventory.
According to comScore, an internet marketing research company, Facebook collects as
much data from its visitors as Google and Microsoft.
Facebook generally has a lower clickthrough rate (CTR) for advertisements
than most major websites.

8. Political Impact
 Facebook's role in the American political process was demonstrated
in January 2008, when Facebook teamed up with ABC and Saint Anselm
College to allow users to give live feedback about the "back to back"
January 5 Republican and Democratic debates.
 Facebook users took part in debate groups organized around specific
topics, register to vote, and message questions. Over 1,000,000 people
installed the Facebook application 'US politics' in order to take part, and
the application measured users' responses to specific comments made by
the debating candidates.
 In February 2008, a Facebook group called "One Million Voices Against
FARC" organized an event that saw hundreds of thousands of Colombians
march in protest against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

9. Behind Facebook's success
• The exceptional popularity of this social networking site (SNS) in
tricky cyber terrain is evident from the fact that the number of its
active users has crossed 500 million.
• The imagination boggles: if Facebook were a country, it would be
the third most populous in the world.
• The key to understanding the success of Facebook is that it rode
on what social media theorist Clay Shirky characterises as the
ability of the Internet to transform the manner in which
information is created, shared, and distributed.
• The ease with which users can air their views and moods is an
empowering attribute that prompts a global clientele to sign up.

10.  Over the past six years, it went from being a closed user-group to one that gradually
opened up: to high school networks, corporate networks, and finally anyone on Earth
with an Internet connection.
 At its most basic level, it reflects the success of an idea that forced society to sit up and
take notice.
 Facebook's effectiveness is in its user-friendly approach behind which lies the
application of cutting edge Internet technologies to serve a basic urge: the quest for
information.
 It also ties in with contemporary knowledge society, marked by the ability of individuals
quickly to create, package, and share content around the world.
 Facebook's success has its caveats, such as privacy concerns, which it is obliged to
address regularly.

11. Facebook for Business:
Opportunities and Limitations
Ways Facebook Can Help Your Business
a) Facebook Pages — Facebook “Pages” (that’s with a capital
“P”) were created to give businesses their own profile on
Facebook.
b) Groups — Groups on Facebook are similar to Pages, but are
meant to be built around a group of people rather than an
individual business or brand.
c) Applications — Facebook has a very powerful API that you
can have developers write software for to help promote your
business on Facebook. Applications give you full power to
say or promote anything you want about your business, and
use the social tie-ins provided by Facebook to do this.

12. d. Advertising — Facebook has a powerful advertising engine that enables businesses to specify
a specific demographic target, see how many people that demographic will hit, and advertise to
that demographic.
e. Polls — Facebook Polls are great for marketers looking to get a quick answer about a
particular feature they’d like to implement, or just to find out information and opinions from a
specific demographic.
f. Facebook Connect — just announced last week at F8, Facebook Connect enables your website
to easily integrate with Facebook.

13. What Facebook Still Needs To Do
• More Application Integration Points for Pages
• More Pages Integration With the Rest of
Facebook
• Skinning and Customization on Pages
• Better Access to Business Tools