WSI Internet Franchise Blog

In a recent article published in FayerWayer by Cony Sturm, he presents a world map, in which the countries where Facebook is the social media market leader are shown. This leadership is gained by having the highest market share within the social media options in the related country.  Even though you might think that all social media options are available to every person in every country, in reality this is not true, as there are some very specific applications that are developed for a small number of participants. Plus, some countries – like China and Venezuela – place restrictions over web content.

According to Wikipedia, the idea that developed into Facebook started at Harvard University in 2003, when Mark Zuckerberg copied private dormitory ID images onto a web site, and in just a few hours generated more than 22,000 visits.  As the pictures were obtained with no authorization, this brought a series of problems to Zuckerberg, delaying the deployment of his idea until 2004.  Facebook was founded by Zuckerberg and 3 other computer science students, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Cris Hughes, starting with the Universities of the United States, and quickly moving to the rest of the world.

It is surprising to see a “phenomenon” like this, that in little over 6 years have reached almost 600 million users, who share its images, comments, events and opinions with people around the globe.  This evolution can be seen graphically in an interesting article written by Vicenzo Cosenza, where in the last two years he analyzed 132 countries, of which Facebook is the leader in 115, representing 87%.

As expected, this “world” within our world is being used as a digital marketing tool to promote businesses and politicians, by amateurs to professionals who want to expand their initiatives among Facebook users.  As this is a significant change over the initial service that moved millions of people to use Facebook, three unanswered questions come to my mind, where your opinion will be of great value:

1. Will this invasion of businesses and politicians affect the development of Facebook, or threaten its future?
2. Are we in front of the platform where the war over the subtle domain of the collective thinking will take place?
3. Will Facebook eventually dominate in every country of the world?

Let us know what you predict for the future of Facebook and become a fan of the WSI Social Facebook page for the latest digital marketing news and updates!