Facebook Case Study

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I am studying the private enterprise Facebook Inc. Who are the owners of popular social networking site Facebook.com formally “thefacebook.com” founded in “Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States” (Wikipedia 2012).

“Thefacebook” was initially co-founded in a Harvard University dorm room by four students at the time. Firstly Mark Zuckerburg , he was the initial founder of the site having previously created a very popular university again based website entitled “facemash” where users could contrast and compare women to their opinion.

Following the closure of this site by Harvard University’s Computer department, the initial and sole founder Mark began work on his second project which would lead him to being one of the youngest billionaires in the world. www.thefacebook.com.

Following the creation of the site Mark immediately enlisted the future Chief Financial Operator Eduardo Saverin , the head of the programming team Dustin Moskovitz , Chief graphic artist Andrew McCollum and lastly there marketing associate Chris Hughes.

“Within 24 hours, 1,200 Harvard students had signed up, and after one month, over half of the undergraduate population had a profile” (The Guardian, 2010 )

The company then expanded amongst universities at a very rapid speed until it encapsulated all of them and expanded to high schools until September of 2006 when they announced the social network was open to anyone over 13.

The Private internet sector company Facebook Incorporated was initially registered in Florida and based in Harvard University but was then re-incorporated following new investment in Palo Alto, California (Facebook , 2010) and most recently has moved to Menlo Park, California.

The company now is registered as Facebook Corporation (a corporation being a legal entity that is effectively recognised as a person under the law (Wikipedia , 2006) ) .

The large majority of Facebook’s revenue is derived form selling advertising. Although Microsoft are Facebook’s exclusive partner for serving the advertisements and so all are stored on Microsoft’s advertising inventory.

Due to a massive increase every year in their revenue Facebook Inc have filed their S1 document on February 1st 2012. This will then enable Securities and Exchange Commission to value the company and eventually allow it to be publically traded. If the valuations are as the rumours and calculations stipulate it will be one of the biggest web companies to ever be traded with a valuation of between 75 and 100 Million Dollars.

I would suggest Facebook has opted to use a geographically based divisional Structure, where the company has a central set of rules and has offices in multiple locations to spread awareness and increase revenue in each individual region.

Now in reference to Facebook, they are now geographically based around