Andy Johns (Andy Johns), graduated from UCLA, worked as a Facebook user Growth team engineer, Twitter's product manager, and later served as product manager for the user growth team in the Quora. And in a question and answer at Quora, he revealed a lot about the Facebook team that many people care about.
Facebook, the most-watched Internet IPO, has a market capitalisation of more than hundreds of billions of dollars on its debut, with more than 500 million users worldwide, almost as one of the next most promising companies on the Internet. Behind Facebook's success, there are plenty of places to learn from. The following is sorted out from Andy Johns's answer.
I want to answer this question by revealing Facebook's exact and strategic decisions. What I want to tell you is that these strategies can be nuanced and fascinating, and readers will find it interesting to read. The "Optimization list" is very long and most people can't remember it. I'm not involved in most of these optimization lists, but I know them by being close to those who deal with these issues. This "growth team" has 30-40 people, and my daily work is included in this series of things that are likely to happen at any time and need to be optimized.
There are several different "decisions", including: tactics, tactics, employment, priorities and culture. The "Growth team" participates in the discussion of any type of decision, as these issues are critical to the "Growth team".
Tactical
There are many tactics, but not as well-known as internet marketing Tactics 101: "Test-optimize-remove errors-repeat this process."
If you want to know the "List of test and optimization methods for different parts of the product or the channels involved", read my previous article "Some of the top strategies for dialog tuning." I guarantee that any of the strategies in this article will be applied to Facebook's products in one way or another.
Again, I cannot give details about something that is not obvious or public, and I can't share the data. Because the "growth team" will fine-tune the development of some of Facebook's features in the future, I don't think the depth is too deep and complex. Some tactics cannot be said because they are too effective.
Employer
People who are recruited into the growing ranks can present their own views on the most important decisions. The current ranks are led by Chamas Baria Bidia (Chamath Palihapitiya).
Chamas is by far the most outstanding person I have ever worked with. He specializes in in-depth analysis, and vigorously focus on "success", is a natural leader and supervisor, enterprising, not afraid of risk, or know the consumer technology "Black belt master." He is the backbone of a growing team, and Facebook makes it a wise choice to lead him.
I remember the first postmenstrual with him for lunch to get to know him better. All the people who came to this team had lunch with him. Lunch is very formal. But my conversation with Chamas was casual. I remember asking him, "So, what's the user I'm looking for?" Is there a specific population or region? Is that important? Then he firmly replied, "Use the least amount of time to attract the most ' Mom ' users!" In other words, don't ask such silly questions next time. Try to get people around the world to use Facebook. I should be very clear, right? I like him when I start to work.
He also brought Breck Ross, Alix Sco, Javille Olivian and several other talents to the growing ranks. They are superior in their ability to engage in direct market needs such as search engine optimization, PPC client, email, A/B testing, marketing, link building, to the depth of technology and front-end technology developers, designers, data scientists and so on.
Javille Olivian is responsible for building and measuring the international growth component of the growing ranks. He helped set up an international department with several engineers and wrote apps that would allow users to help us translate the Facebook web site. This process always makes me "in a terrifying".
The biggest hurdle before reaching 500 million or more users is to get everyone on Facebook to use their language. Language localization is the "Best Equalizer", Nick Fra in the video. It makes Facebook a platform that everyone on the planet can use. I think there are 80 of Facebook's interface languages at the moment. Engineers designed this tool to allow users to translate for our website. The growth team is simply a country that employs 10 people, and then puts the translated language in the first 20 countries that use the language, hoping to bring the user's growth. The growth team is just a system for measuring the work of engineers, and then let our users improve Facebook for themselves.
Policy
You can think of several strategies to increase the number of users. One of them is that we classify the growth funnel, which guides us through the path of growth. For example, you can say that growth can be broken down into several basic questions:
1. How to increase the rate of acquisition, such as the number of logins?
2. How to motivate them to integrate into Facebook as soon as possible in the first n days after the user registers?
3. What are the barriers to attracting and retaining users? How do we keep them?
4. How to pull the lost users back to Facebook, get them to "resurrect" the account and reuse Facebook?
By answering these questions, you can identify the products you have some influence on (for example, which products bring in clicks), and How to do (1) optimize the channel to add value (2) Add new access to user channels to increase the number of clicks. For example, the following is an available funnel chart for the user:
Invite Users
Import contacts and send invitations
Unlimited/Limited number of invitations
Number of new users added after inviting users
Homepage Logout design and how to convert to let user login
Registered Account Confirmation
Wait
Then you can try to put your existing user access channels in a new channel to tier. Try to compare the access user to a colorful line chart. You need to add a new color to the diagram, because each new line represents a new source of user access. For example:
Affiliate Marketing
Googleadword paid search ads or Facebook's own ads
Buy mobile installation ads via mobile ad platforms, such as Flurry and MDOTM
Wait
Strategy can also be a merger or acquisition of enterprises or the way the strategic cooperation exists. TechCrunch said in January 2010 that Facebook had bought a company called Octazen. This is the great result of the negotiations in the "Growth team", because Octazen is famous for the contact's import service. A large percentage of Facebook users have contacts in a mailbox business like GMX. Not everyone uses Hotmail, gmail or Yahoo Mail.
Allow users to import all contacts can provide the data they need for businesses like Facebook and LinkedIn, making it easier for them to recommend contacts or friends to users, and then to connect users to people they know. Many social media services allow contacts to be imported. But how many Web sites can be imported into all kinds of email contacts? I only know two of them: Facebook and LinkedIn.
The growth team also negotiates partnerships with other companies. Sometimes, outside the United States, partnerships can open up foreign markets because of the relationship between international entities. In October 2010, Facebook worked with Yandex to update Yandex with firehose data. Yandex is Russia's largest search engine and is currently buying its product's outstanding UI design with Facebook. This is how users grow.
Sometimes growth teams are responsible for risk. Facebook is one of them. Click here to read. But TechCrunch is right: Facebook does not pose a threat to Twitter or other competitors. Facebook is a shrunken version of Facebook, but it's faster to open. Opening a slow web site is unacceptable to users. Google is the best example of a technology company, and he tells people how important it is for a site to open quickly to attract users and allow users to accept it.
Amazon has also shown that a 100 millisecond delay in opening a site means losing 1 million of dollars in revenue each day. Facebook's opening up in parts of the world needs to be speeded up in order to perform well in a low-bandwidth country, but that's not the problem in our fast-moving countries. So a group of engineers locked themselves in the boardroom for 4 weeks, then created a Facebook and put it on the Indian market. Although Facebook failed in the end, it completed his mission at the time, and it was a perfect illustration of how Web-page opening was the preferred option for Web-page engineering.
Culture and priorities
Facebook has fostered a distinctive corporate culture in various interviews with mainstream media and technology. In the growth team, Chamas to cultivate a "balanced offensive culture," a great responsibility, that is, to make the site progress.
The growing environment is obvious. As you walk into the corner of the Facebook building, you see a flag hanging above the staff, representing not only the nationality of the employee, but also the international market that Facebook is aiming for.
Growth teams are also under great pressure from management. That is, we have to stay radical and take the risk of giving everyone on the planet the opportunity to use Facebook. The growth team is supported by management. The figure below can explain to you how close Chamas and management are, and what it means to a growing team.
Chamas's growing ranks are not as subordinate to the main function of the marketing team as the paid search team. The growth team is parallel to Facebook, just like the parallel Engineering/technical Operations department behind Facebook. Some people can't help asking, "If we build and allow a product X, what will it do to allow and stabilize the performance of the Web page?" People also ask, "How does it affect user growth to build and run a product x?" At Facebook, the decision to make "user growth" the authoritative part of the discussion of product, engineering, and website operations is really important, and it is up to management.
Summary
For the past two years, I have often thought of such questions and dialogues. The significance of user growth is significant, and the contribution to business in the age of consumer technology is enormous, although it seems primitive but significant. Nature tells us that we have to use tactics, tactics, or tactics to achieve our goals. "Management tactics" is naturally a necessary part of the task of making the user grow. But in order to have 500 million users, it is necessary to let all of this go together. Culture, priorities, and employment allow us to build a team that provides a table and gives our team the mission to use tactics and tactics. Because tactics and tactics may have been used before, a growing team that can "beat him" cannot have a system of peculiar culture, priorities and reasonable employment. (Zhang Xin)