Question & Answer: why is facebook successful…

Expert Answer

There are multiple reasons for Facebook’s success. The most prominent being that Facebook has always maintained its focus on building a great product over every other aspect of business, such as revenues, profits. In the very initial years as well, Mark Zuckerberg didn’t fall prey to ads ruining the product, instead he sacrificed short term financial rewards for making a great product.

The other most significant reason for Facebook’s success is its simplicity for users. There have many other social networks such as Orkut, MySpace that just current match up to the simplicity that Facebook offered to its users. And this is a result of the focus that Mark Zuckerberg had on making Facebook a great product for people to use.

As it grew rapidly, Facebook made hiring mistakes, as do other growing companies. But Facebook was quick to fix those mistakes by replacing the executives as quickly as possible.

In the initial years, Mark Zuckerberg seriously lacked CEO skills, but he was quick to learn from people like Steve Jobs, Warren Buffett and some of his own executives.

Companies usually focus on months and quarters and they end up making mistakes for short term financial rewards. But successful companies realise that being great is like a marathon, it requires consistent focus on the long term vision and not be distracted by short term goals. Facebook always maintained its focus on its long term vision that falling prey to the short term tactics of beating shareholder’s expectations of earnings.

Add Steve Jobs once said “customers don’t know what they want” Facebook built great features, such as news feed. It was initially criticized, but it was improved constantly until it became one of the most popular features.

Facebook has always learned and grown as a result of criticism, rather than being unsettled by it. It has managed to balance the interests of its customers, investors and employees well, while maintaining its focus on making Facebook a great, innovative and simple to use product. These are all the secrets of Facebook’s success.