SWOT Analysis for Facebook

According to Cohen 2008, pg. 6 Facebook is a social platform that combines features of communication like e-mail, instant messaging, photo sharing, and blogging programs and allows one to monitor online friends' activities. Just like any other website Facebook has its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

Facebook's strength is that it allows the society to follow celebrities and politicians which keeps them updated with current affairs. Not only do people follow celebrities and politicians but they can also stay connected to their family members regardless of the vast distance between them, this can be done through posts, videos, photos and many more.

The fact that people can connect to each other regardless of being continents apart means that Facebook has brought forth cultural diversity, people can talk people with different cultural backgrounds and get a sense of how other cultures and countries do things.

One other strength Facebook has is that it is a real time social networking site, this means that with Facebook information shared can be of beneficial to a user when they read it at that point in time, be it news on the political standing of a particular country or information from other users regarding their opinions. For every post made Facebook shows the date and time the post was made, it also arranges posts according to the latest one made, thus the posts we see first are more current.

The introduction of the mobile app has escalated the amount of daily users of the application as compared to that of before when the service was only available through desktop. The introduction availed to the company the opportunity to capture new markets, mainly in Brazil and India and also maximize the existing United States of America market. Secondly, having a constant customer base, Facebook has the ability to personalize applications to individual consumer taste and preference. These are constantly updated and then are used to make an up-to-date database on all their customers.

This benefits the company and makes it competitive with other major social media companies like skype and WeChat. Although the up-to-date clientele information makes the company stand out compared to its competitors, it also makes then up to par with the dynamic society status quo making for a desirable environment for investors, advertisers and businesses to be carried out on the social media platform. Because they excel in making user experiences more comfortable, various products aimed at achieving this have been introduced.

These include the Facebook Live feature, the 360 degrees photo, "save" feature for posts and videos and the video call feature. Facebook also has a strong financial position in the market making it resilient as opposed to other sites. This is achieved by having a profit based (lucrative) database on client's location, connection and interests that are valuable to the customer. Enabling them to target the right market for growth and profit. One of its strengths is that it has a strong brand image. Facebook is known across all ages, countries and continents. It allows for a person to become a user from as early as 13 years of age and

Although Facebook has exceptional strengths it also has its weaknesses. Facebook's greatest weakness is its privacy model, because facebook's privacy model is complicated most users find it difficult to understand and use, this leaves the users profiles and information unprotected. Failure to use the privacy model results in users deactivating their accounts or being dormant users.

One other weakness is cyber-crimes. Cyber-crimes are a problem in all internet platforms but because Facebook has billions of users cyber-crime is more hazardous. There are a lot of cyber-crimes that affect Facebook; cyber bullying, this is where people post nasty comments on another users profile and it is done intentionally to degrade and harass the user.

Fraud is another form of cyber-crime that affects Facebook drastically, people form fake business accounts and use these accounts to steal money from other users, this reflects badly on the honest businesses on Facebook and makes users reluctant to trust Facebook based businesses.one other cyber-crime that impacts Facebook is Catfishing. This is a term that refers to identity theft or the use of other people's identities to push one's own motives, be it business or relations. This is due to an authentication problem. There is no guarantee or measure set to ensure that the accounts created are legit and that no internet crime is being commited.

Facebook's weakness is also that it cannot limit the number of accounts an individual creates which leads to one person having multiple facebook accounts,still on the matter of facebook accounts facebook has no measure set to ensure that certain accounts are deleted or erased after being domant for tens of years. This results in some families being against the creation of facebook accounts because once a family member has passed on their facebook reminder remains a connstatnt reminder and the family members followers make whichever comments they want and post whatever they want on the deceased's wall.eventhough this might appear to comfort other families most families are hurt by it instead.

Growing use of ad blocks: Well learned facebook users have installed extensions that block advertisements from their websites. This is a big problem to facebook because the number of such users is increasing and if it continues to escalate facebook will lose revenue because that's how it gets more money, through advertisements.

Weak business model. Facebook's aim is to attract social network users, display the ads for them and charge the businesses for the ads displayed. Although Facebook's business model looks sound for the moment, the company may face severe difficulties if some conditions change that are not in firm's control. For example, slowing growth of online advertising, new social network, shift from advertising on Facebook to other websites, growing number of mobile users (Facebook is yet unable to monetize them) or failure to diversify source of income.

Facebook has indeed provided good services that were helpful but surely it isn't enough, the world has not explored nor exploited all that Facebook has to offer. In terms of bettering their lives and improving communication as a whole, Facebook still has a lot of potential to grow and improve. There is still room for development especially because the growth in the market in Europe has saturated while in Africa it is still quite open. Instead of that being a bad thing, Facebook management can actually capitalize on that especially because there are a lot of raw materials in Africa, they can use their cyber skills to explore Africa and actually gain profit.

Facebook was always presented with an opportunity to diversify the services it provided in order to keep up with the ever changing interests of its users (environmental change). This would have led to an increase in their customer base and consequently attract more advertisers therefore increasing its revenues thus keeping facebook's financial growth on a high. However, its complacency on exploiting this opportunity backfired on them as they experienced a drastic decline in their revenues, therefore threatening the resilient brand (facebook) that was built over the years. Despite the decline, Facebook ended up embracing the opportunity and using it to its benefit before it hit its death as Mark noted that 2019 will be a year of investment.

Face book was also faced with a threat of market saturation in the US and a slight decline in Europe. With these countries being the leading market of facebook, business pulled back and sought for other ways to advertise their products. The threat could be traced to lack of product innovation and strategic ways to penetrate the market (opportunities facebook could have used to enhance its growth).

Since facebook is a worldwide app; connecting people of different financial statuses from all parts of the world. It should have taken advantage of this strength to utilize an opportunity of penetrating the market in Africa, Asia and other places. Selling facebook as an advertising platform for both small and large businesses, selling variable products (expensive and affordable) to prospective advertisers would have seen advertisers swarming to facebook to expand their territory.

This approach would have kept facebook's financial state robust for a longer time. However, facebook failed to use this channel of advertising to keep prospective advertisers interested in it. This created a gap of which its competitors were more likely to latch on to hence most advertisers left facebook and consequently creating a dent in the company's brand and financial growth.

The main challenge that Facebook is currently facing is decline in financial growth due to loss of advertisers. The inability to retain its advertisers it's a weakness to the company. That could have been managed by the use of their innovative force to come up with strategic solutions and keep Facebook in line with day to day changes.

Even though Facebook happen to have a strong customer base they faced a challenge when they experienced a decline in daily users in Europe after they introduced the digital privacy law in their country. To avoid this the company could have enforced their internal structure (database) to ensure that the privacy of their users is safe so that people use it freely without getting worried about their private information.

It also got challenged when it reached the saturation point other countries like U.S but they could have could have used this as an opportunity to penetrate other markets where Facebook is not popular this could help them boost their customer base and also attract some advertisers which will help increase the revenues of the company. There was also a rise in different social sites this became a challenge to Facebook, this was avoided when Facebook seized it as an opportunity to introduce and merge other application like instagram and whatsapp to lessen the competition.

References

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