Facebook goes public today in one of the most anticipated business events in the last, um, forever?
According to Forbes, the stock will sell at $38 per share, making the value of the company around $104 Billion. Pretty crazy, especially considering that even Facebook admits to not knowing how to consistently monetize the views of 488 million mobile users (according to the video below). Funny, I have as much frustration using the mobile versions of Facebook as they do making money off of me using them. I guess it’s just a case of what BIG predicted, mo’ money, mo’ problems.
The same could be said about social media in my opinion. Trying to figure out social platforms and consistently update each of the seemingly countless “cool” newcomers is increasingly impossible. As an individual we have it easy, imagine having the chain of command that most corporate structures have in place. How much approval is needed for 140 characters or less? I can only imagine, a lot more time goes into approval than the amount of time that goes into potential customers reading it. According to this Buddy Media post, 178 is the number of corporate social media accounts on average, as of last summer. No doubt, that number has increased. A look at the graphic below from Business Insider shows just how wicked the web of social media is woven, and that doesn’t include the latest social trend, Pinterest (which, clearly I have been slacking on). After just a glance at all the different social media platforms and connected apps, mobile apps, analytics, tracking, advertising, marketing and more, it kind of makes sense that Facebook is valued so high, clearly none of the companies below can claim over 900 million users worldwide, not even on a good day. Even if Facebook’s engagement is horrible (hypothetically speaking), they’re still going to have more engaged users than nearly anyone on the web at any given moment. That’s worth a lot of billions by itself.
