Comments on: Hypothetical CEO – What Would YOU Do with Facebook?

By: Çağdaş Ünal

Çağdaş Ünal — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 17:59:48 +0000

Facebook needs more tools for business members. For example, Involver has a lot of paid apps and services for Facebook pages. A lot of industry leaders pays for it. Envato does it too.

Facebook has everything to do it. A smart CEO, a lot of developers, marketing experts and millions of users bla bla. Facebook is huge but not dynamic.

By: JohnieAmca

JohnieAmca — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 16:15:14 +0000

I think that when fb is going to charge money for uploading pictures or videos. the users of fb will go down. the idea with the subscription plan for business will not optimaly work. because now a days u can make a business profile for free nd why shouldnt a company use a free profile on facebook to promote their products. they can upload a video easily on youtube and attach it in facebook for free.

By: David

David — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 05:57:52 +0000

Cut and run. All the long time FB users I know are sick of all the crap and only visit occasionally to see what friends are up to. FB is still riding the initial user fad wave.

By: Brett

Brett — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 20:40:37 +0000

I like the idea of charging a subscription for business pages. That is really a necessity. Facebook is essentially granting businesses free advertising and I think they could really make some strong revenue from that. And as you said there could be tiers of prices for small businesses or startups. Then as you make more updates and get more going with more fans, you would have to increase your subscription because this is making the assumption that your business has grown etc.

I also think there are things they could charge regular users for. There are some people out there that upload their entire life in pictures to Facebook. They could implement a monthly photo upload limit and if you go over that pay an additional fee for an extra set of photo uploads. Same goes for videos. Not as many upload videos so 2-3 videos per month could be plausible. Any more and you could start charging 3 dollars per video or something.

Facebook will find the answer soon…I could see it happening. I don’t see Facebook being a fad like Xanga and things like that.

By: Shawn

Shawn — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 18:21:22 +0000

There are so many avenues that they can go to make profit. I think one direction they could go is look back at their roots. They started as a way for college students to keep in touch. They could expand on this by creating a learning management system like blackboard or moodle. Something they could charge subscriptions for. I talk a bit more about my thoughts on facebook as a lms here http://ow.ly/COjm

By: Jonathan Surinx

Jonathan Surinx — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 13:38:06 +0000

Donation, could be a good idea too. As people are giving money to support wikipedia why not “Do you want to keep using Facebook ? Support us…”

I also completely agree with your other suggestions.

Jon

By: wdohmen

wdohmen — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 09:59:12 +0000

I would go for a subscription plan for users, where for a small monthly payment they can have more control over their profile, in terms of design, more of a myspace like control over it, and no ads on the site like deviantart. Next to that you could give them more powerful features. Another thing for them to do is to create some sort of Habbo hotel in to this payment plan. Or get their hands on companies like Zynga who create social games, and make social goods their income stream.

And they have 300+ million users, using an affiliate system from say Amazon, they could use their user base to make an effective e-commerce ecosystem in to their platform and make money of it I think.

By: IdeaTagger

IdeaTagger — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 07:46:42 +0000

As the hypothetical CEO of Facebook, I would focus on using the social graph to help advertisers convert website visitors into buyers, subscribers, members etc.

Conversion is perhaps the one thing worth as much if not more than advertising to a publisher or business. Facebook is probably better placed than anyone to help with this.

I’ve written more on the specifics of how they might do this on my blog and I shouldn’t take up too much space here with those ideas. Besides, more than my specific ideas on how, it is the general notion of Facebook helping with conversion that I wish to convey. Others may in fact have better ideas than I on the how.

By: Andy Ford

Andy Ford — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 07:17:27 +0000

I’d rename it to ashitloadofupdatesaboutstupidgamesandquizes.com

By: Tyler King

Tyler King — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 06:15:52 +0000

Maybe this is implied in your idea for business users, but I think Facebook could add a lot of functionality that wouldn’t really bloat their existing application. In particular, most people use LinkedIn for business relationships and Facebook for personal purposes. Facebook should set out to change this. Here are the steps I think would be necessary:

Allow users to make a business version of their profile so that if they wanted to be “friends” with a business contact, they could show their professional side. As things are now, I’ll never befriend someone on Facebook if they could end up being important to my career.

Once that’s done, I think Facebook should aim to slowly take over another already established industry. If I had a professional profile and I could upload a resume, Facebook could be my go-to job searching location. When I’m looking for a job (and only when I’m looking for a job) I’d love for Facebook to automatically match me with potential employers and put possible matches in my news feed.

This is just an example of a more general strategy. There are a lot of sites right now that are more useful as more users join. Facebook already has a user base that no one can compete with, so they should be able to take over any number of different existing markets. If they could slowly incorporate new functionality that has already been proven to work on a smaller scale with other websites, they could finally leverage their 300 million users.

The real key to doing this would be to make sure that they don’t clutter up the existing site. If they ad job searching, apartment hunting, or anything else like that, it would need to be neatly tucked away so that everyone can keep using Facebook the way they do now.