How Facebook attracts customers

According to the information we know, on the US question and answer website Quora, the Facebook two former employees gave a detailed answer to the question of how Facebook got the first 500 million users.

At the time of last year, Facebook had already made an initial public offering, and the user growth rate eased. At this point we seem to have been able to sit down easily and think that Facebook's success is naturally inevitable. But this idea is somewhat taken for granted. Facebook currently has 1 billion users. The site's user volume was initially increased to 100 million, using only 10 quarters, while 12-quarter users have increased to 500 million. This rapid growth is very surprising.

So why is Facebook's user capacity soaring to 500 million in such a short period of time? On the Quora website, some former employees of Facebook have detailed some behind-the-scenes stories about this. And these stories, for those who want to rapidly develop the user base of the start-up companies, there is no doubt a significant reference.

First, Andy Johns, a former employee of Facebook, Andy Johns the question: What decisions did Facebook's "Growth team" make that prompted the site to reach 500 million users?

Here's what Johns answers:

The answer to this question is: what are the specific strategic decisions that make a difference? In the following answer, I will do my best to share with you the detailed process of making these decisions, because readers will find this information valuable. There are some things I have to keep secret because of the reasons I have worked before, so I only disclose the materials that can be disclosed here. In other words, I will not disclose specific data to you, nor will I comment on materials that have not yet been made public. On the other hand, because some optimization items are slip long, it is difficult to remember them specifically. I am not directly involved in these major optimization projects, but are aware of them through other employees who are involved in solving these problems. The size of the team was increased to 30~40, and my day-to-day work, which was part of the optimization, was ongoing.

In the case of "decision", it can be divided into different types. There are both "tactical" decisions and "strategy" decisions, as well as decisions on recruitment, priority development and corporate culture. The Facebook growth team participates in the process of making all of these types of decisions that are critical to the team.

Tactical decision

Many of these tactical decisions need to be named, but most can be attributed to "Internet Marketing 101": Testing, optimization, tuning and repetition. If you want to see a list of testing and optimization options for a product or a different component of the relevant channel, take a look at my answer to the question "What are the top strategies for transfer optimization?" To be sure, any of these strategies are applied in one way or another to different parts of the Facebook product. But what I need to say again is that I am not in a state to disclose specific data or figures that have not been published publicly. I am also not in the process of revealing the different aspects of the team that are involved in tweaking the product, and it is these products that have contributed to the rapid growth of Facebook's users. There are other tactics I can't disclose, because these tactics are really too effective.

Recruitment decision

For those recruited into the Facebook growth team, participation in the team is undoubtedly the most important decision in their career. The team leader is Chamas Parihapitia (Chamath Palihapitiya).

Facebook's growth team head for Chamas Parihapitia (Tencent technology map)

Parihapitia is the best work colleague I have ever met. He was insightful and focused on how to succeed (as he would say: "Smash it!"). He has the leadership ability, can inspire the staff enthusiasm, can take the initiative in the work and dares to undertake the risk, to the consumer science and technology domain to be able to understand in the bosom. He is the backbone of the Facebook growth team. Making him the head of the team is certainly a very shrewd decision. I remember having lunch with him during my first week of joining the team to learn more about him. This approach has been fixed for all new employees recruited by the growth team. The content is also serious, but the way I talk to him is far from being "serious". I remember asking him: "What kind of user should I focus on? Is it important to have a specific population or region?" Parihapitia firmly replied: "Now is xx occupy the site, so you can grab the site all give me xx Rob over." "In other words, stop asking such silly questions next time." Is it clear that all the people on the planet are logged on to Facebook? From the beginning, I liked this person.

He later recruited others into the growth team, including Black Ross (Blake Ross), Alex Schulz (Alex Schultz), Javille Olivan (Javier Olivan) and other talented people. These employees have different aspects of expertise, involving direct access to marketing (SEO, PPC, Mail, A/B testing, promotion and link formation, etc.), deep background and foreground technology development, design and data research and so on.

Olivan is responsible for international growth and scaling in the growth team. He helped build an international team of different technology developers and developed translation applications that enable Facebook users to engage in translation work. The following video reveals the corresponding process. See these processes, always let me heartbeat.

Facebook's users can quickly increase to 500 million or more of the biggest advantages, perhaps the site can be made available to all languages in the world to understand the user. As Nico Villa (Nico Vera) says in this video, language localization is a "great weapon". In this way, the Facebook platform can provide services to users anywhere in the world. As far as I know, Facebook has been able to support 80 languages worldwide. The reason for this is that the growth team's technology developers have developed a tool that will enable Facebook users to do the translation work for us. The growth team does not hire 10 people in each country and region, and then arranges them into the 20 most important national markets to achieve user growth. On the contrary, the growth team is actually intended to build a large-scale technology development system, so that our users to achieve our product scale growth.

Strategic decisions

One of the ways we can think about strategic decisions in different ways is how we can work out the growth channel framework as a whole and how that framework will adapt to our growth roadmap. For example, we can say that user growth can actually be refined into four basic issues:

1, how do I increase the user access rate, for example, to obtain more registered users?

2, in the days after the registration of users, I should take the way to make as many users as possible to complete the activation work as soon?

3. What is the most effective way to engage and retain users? How do we implement these methods?

4. How can I save those users from the "death" state and make them "reborn"?

User access (Tencent Technology matching map)

From the above issues, we can find the specific route of product development, these products can affect some indicators (for example, what products can help to get users?) and then consider the following two questions: 1 to optimize these channels to bring more value; 2 to build new user access channels, To increase the value of the acquisition. For example, the following are some of the issues you can consider in your build access channel:

-User Registration Invitation

-Contact output → send invitation

-Open/click-through to invite mail

-Rate of user conversations after invitation

-Homepage exit design and the ratio of this design to new registered users

-Steps for user registration process

-Account verification after registration

Wait a minute.

Then we can try to put the current user access channel together with the new access channel. To use user access as a layered linear chart, you want to add more layers to the chart because each product layer represents a different source of user access. For example:

-User Marketing

-Via AdWords's paid search and/or Facebook's own ads

-Get mobile users, and so on, via mobile ad platforms such as Flurry and MDOTM.

Strategic development also exists in corporate acquisitions and strategic partnerships. In a February 2010 report, TechCrunch, the US Science and technology information website, said Facebook had bought a company called Octazen. This is a shrewd decision made by the Facebook user Growth team because Octazen can provide contact export services. A larger percentage of Facebook users store their contacts in different e-mail service providers, and not all users use Hotmail, gmail or Yahoo Mail.

Let's take a look at the list of mail clients supported by the American professional social networking site LinkedIn (note that by clicking on the bottom link, you can expand the number of other unread mail clients, which is nearly 100). I exported the following chart directly from the LinkedIn Contacts export service:

e-Mail Service provider list (Tencent technology map)

Enables users to export all their contact data, enabling companies such as Facebook and LinkedIn to get the data they need, and the ability to use that data to provide a friend referral service to the user and to have the user find a known contact. Although a large number of social media services allow users to export contact data, how many of these services can support all e-mail clients around the world? For now, I know only two companies can do it, and that's Facebook and LinkedIn.

The Facebook user Growth team is also responsible for negotiating partnerships. Some of these deals involve working with international companies to promote the growth of Facebook outside the US market. In October 2010, Facebook and the Russian search engine provider Yandex reached a cooperation agreement to provide FIREHOSE status upgrades to Yandex. Yandex is now aggressively promoting Facebook products in their user interface, a measure that has certainly brought growth to Facebook.

Facebook's Lite Web site is one of the big risks that Facebook's growth team has to bear at times (see: Http://techcrunch.com/2009/08/12 ...). TechCrunch said well. The Lite site is not intended to launch an attack on Twitter, nor any competitor associated with it, but is actually a lite version of Facebook to improve access. If the site is slow, it can cause some users to be unwilling to use it. Google (Weibo) has used practical action to model the technology industry: the speed of access is an important factor in attracting users to use the appropriate services. Amazon has also confirmed that the 100-microsecond access delay means the site will lose 1 million dollars of revenue per day (refer to: http://www.strangeloopnetworks.c ...). For those markets with low broadband access, Facebook also needs to grow at a high rate. So a small technology development team in Facebook spent 4 weeks in a small conference room, developed a lite website, and then deployed the site in the Indian market. Although the product was eventually canceled, the site had already reached its goal, and it showed that the technology development team was taking the speed of Web site access as a priority task.

Corporate culture and priority development decisions

Despite the extensive coverage of mainstream media and technology media, Facebook does form a unique corporate culture. In the Facebook growth team, Parihapitia has fostered an aggressive technology development culture that drives the growth of the Facebook site to its fastest pace.

This growth environment is within reach. We walked into a corner of the team's office building, and we could see all the flags hanging, not just the countries we recruited, but also the global markets that Facebook wanted to tap into.

Banner of Growth Team Office (Tencent Technology map)

I can't find the picture at the moment, but in the 1601 rooms of the Facebook growth team, the California office, it does hang two flags. The first banner said: "Either do well, or go home," a Godzilla (Godzilla) picture hangs next to the banner. On the other side, the banner reads: "Up and to the right." This is what we can see every day, and we can see it all the day at work. These words can always remind us of our team's mission. There are other reminders on the walls of the office, such as the following:

Various reminders text (Tencent Science and Technology match map)

The Facebook executive team also assigns significant tasks to the growth team. This means that we are able to take proactive measures and take risks so that people anywhere in the world can use Facebook services to connect with others. The growth team was strongly supported by the executive team. The following photo shows Parihapitia's close relationship with the Facebook core leadership team and the significance of this relationship to the growth team.

Team members and Zuckerberg photo (Tencent Science and technology with map)

In this photo, from left to right: Parihapitia, Facebook chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg (Mark Zuckerberg), VP of Technology Development, VP of Technical Operations and VP of products. Within Facebook, the growth team did not become a team of E-commerce marketing teams like the paid search team, but a horizontal team across the product, just as technology development/operations was the horizontal framework behind the product. Not only is there a question of "What impact will we have on the speed and stability of the site if we set up X ships", but it usually raises the question of "what will happen to the growth of our users if we build X ships". Decisions about user growth have become an authoritative part of Facebook's product, technology development, and operational discussions, and the importance of these decisions is self-evident.

Summary

For the past two years, I've been thinking about the problem of user growth. We are still in the early stages of understanding how user growth and what benefits these growth will bring to enterprises in the consumer technology industry. And we will naturally return to tactical, tactical, or tactical issues. How to execute tactics, of course, is one of the necessary conditions to achieve user growth. But to quickly increase the use of the user to 500 million, you need all the functions of such things to be integrated together. Corporate culture, priority development tasks, and employee recruitment enable us to build a team that is responsible for tactical strategy development. If there is no corporate culture, priority development tasks, staff recruitment in the former, then the formation of "break It" of the user growth team will undoubtedly be a castle in the castles.

Next, Johns's former boss, Parihapitia, answered the same question.

The following is the answer to Parihapitia:

I think Johns has been talking a lot about this post. As I said to many people, to understand user growth, there are two ways to start:

1, have a fundamental understanding of your products-especially users willing to use the key reasons for the product. I personally think that many people have failed to understand the motives and root causes of by-products and outcomes. Once we understand the true value of the product, we can design a real user experience and really isolate the cause from the result. For example, within Facebook, one of the things we can learn earlier is that the user's interest in a particular time period is closely related to the number of friends. With this connection in view, we can adopt a number of measures to attract new users to find their own interests. But to do this, we first have to make sure that we know what the users are interested in, so that they can impress the Facebook service.

2. Make a simple framework for your work. Many people like to "complicate" things to show that they are smart. The more amazing things are, the simpler they are. We have a very simple framework for user growth that Johns has discussed-user access, activation, participation, and expansion. With this framework, we can identify tasks that require priority development, design a user experience, develop products, and so on. It will also make it clear to all that decisions are made in a transparent and methodical manner.

Incidentally, Naomi Gletter (Naomi gleit) and James Wang (James Wang) have also made great contributions in the initial stages of the Facebook growth team. We (myself, Olivan, Ross, Gretel, Schultz and James Wang) are the first "growth circles" members, the leaders of the growth team. The team continued to thrive within Facebook and attracted a number of other talented new members.