Smart partnering Case study : Facebook
People are the biggest asset. Networking is a great enabler, and the network effect is what we all want. To make people happy and create a network effect for a company is not an easy initiative. But, Facebook did it!
Facebook helps you connect and share content with people in your life.
The Facebook phenomenon has fascinated me for a while now. It has created the biggest network of people in the world, who connect and share their lives with their personal networks. Facebooks makes it relevant and easy for us to share our lives with loved ones.
So how did it create this?
The growth of Facebook aka network effect is based on four core principles:
Simple Experience: The design of the experience and core features was centered on the profile of the user. It provided web2.0 interactivity for any age group to communicate and share multimedia content easily. It made the interaction simple, by enabling common graphical user interaction and text link for navigation. It only focused on people, and how it could enhance their interaction with their network. You do get addicted to the experience once you sign up, right?
Creating the network effect by providing services that Facebook’s customer values and shares with their network: By enabling features like ‘share’, ‘give a gift’ Facebook makes it easy for people to further their
network. Facebook understands — that users invest a great amount of time to complete their profile and provides sticky features such as sharing pictures and content actively — to make it richer. This makes the switching costs for any user to move to other social platforms very high. Facebook innovated its technology to help the user build a rich content store, which is a brilliant idea?
Strategic Partnerships: Smart partnering provides you with an opportunity to compete against big players. Facebook strives to close many partnerships such as Microsoft, Zynga and MOL to place Facebook in the big league. It also strives to take care of its partners in a meaningful way.
Open architecture: It is all about how many people can collaborate and share their IP. Facebook has >15,000 third-party applications and adds more than 140 new apps a day. As the third-party applications are hosted on its own servers, it provides predictability and advantages for the site as well as its users.
Leading mobile transformation: With the rise of mobile, Facebook has allowed all the features required for us to stay connected with our network 24X7 via a mobile phone. As a pioneer at this, it has managed to gain a huge market share.
I will keep a close watch on Facebook’s strategies and share it periodically.
Let’s share our thoughts what you think made Facebook so successful?
