Benchmark By Kendra Neal

What is Facebook? Facebook is a social network service and website launched in February 2004 that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. Users create a personal profiles, add other users as friends, exchange messages, and so much more. Users may join common interest user groups, organized by workplace, school, or college, or other characteristics. The name of the service stems from the name for the book given to students at the start of the academic year by university administrations in the US. Facebook allows anyone who declares themselves to be at least 13 years old to become a registered user of the website. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.

Why is it important to PR?

CHART Facebook Benchmark

Oct (Facemash) Feb (thefacebook) Thefacebook.com The remainder of 2004 (facebook) Jan Facebook in the Future PriceFree!Fee? Access- ibility Nine houses at Harvard University Harvard University The Ivy Leagues, More colleges in U.S. and Canada High school users, Compa ny membe rship, 800 college networ ks Everyone 13 and up (Sept. 2006) The world Usership450 visitors and 22,000 photo-views in its first four hours online +half the undergrad uate population at Harvard +1 million+5.5 million 100 million +600 million FeaturesTwo photos were placed next to each other at a time and asking users to choose the 'hotter' person. Comparable to “Hot or Not” Photos and comment boxes Present day features (groups, wall) Invitati on to join Internatio nal ads New privacy settings and layout FB.com? LeadershipMark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes Added Andrew McCollum Added Sean Parker (Palo Alto, Calif.) Internatio nal headquart ers in Dublin, Ireland Celeb- rities, employe es, major corporat ions Net Worth$12.7 million 15 Billion$50 Billion IPO cand- idate by 2013

Future Challenges for PR Facebook generally has a lower clickthrough rate (CTR) for advertisements than most major websites. This means that a smaller percentage of Facebook's users click on advertisements than many other large websites. Facebook's users click on advertisements an average of 0.04% of the time (400 clicks for every one million pages).

Future Challenges for PR Explanations for Facebook's low CTR include the fact that Facebook's users are more technologically savvy and therefore use ad blocking software to hide advertisements, the users are younger and therefore are better at ignoring advertising messages, and that on MySpace, users spend more time browsing through content while on Facebook, users spend their time communicating with friends and therefore have their attention diverted away from advertisements

Sources Google.com (images)