Nowadays, Facebook is a social network running into billions dollars and known all over the world. Initially, the purpose of launching such a company was connecting people and enabling them to interact with each other. The goals of the company underwent a series of changes within its development process. However, the essence of the main Facebook mission was preserved.

The key elements of company’s mission statement are connection and sharing. In such a way, Facebook helps people to share information with others and to be connected with them on a global scale. Facebook, due to its mission, throws the world open to people (Reagan n.pag.). Facebook has been following its mission statements from its foundation till nowadays; that could be a good explanation for its smashing success. According to the current statistics, the network has about 845 million users per month and approximately 443 million users every day. In 2011, Facebook incomings comprised $3, 7 billion. Furthermore, it was reported that the value of Facebook public offering is approximately $75-100 billion. Due to this fact, the Wall Street Journal considered this network as the biggest stock exchange in the USA (Vakil n.pag.).

There are several factors that influence Facebook activities. The administrators of the company pay keen attention to the site users and appreciate their support as users’ power is significant to the company’s development. Therefore, the network constantly analyses its user’s activity and adds updates, new applications, and features to the site. Uniqueness remains the highest priority for Facebook. Therefore, the competition among its developers is tough. For example, after launching Open Graph and Timeline on Facebook, there was a considerable increase of rivalry among the developers. Facebook collects 85% of its revenue from advertisement and 12% from a game development called Zynga. These factors all together make Facebook a worthy rival to YouTube, Amazon.com, Google, and Twitter (Vakil n.pag.).

Facebook as every successful company has its strong and weak points. Substantial number of users, which nowadays reaches 845 million, and raising revenue with the tendency to grow on 50% every half a year belong to Facebook strengths. High valuation, uncontrollable amount of accounts for one real person, unfavorable conditions of employees, whose salaries are depended on stock price, are considered to be Facebook disadvantages (A SWOT analysis: Is Facebook a good investment - or not n.pag.). Many business experts make their predictions about further development of Facebook. It is suggested that in order to surpass Google, as one of Facebook’s rival, the company’s marketing strategy will include creation of retrieval system on the basis of “Likes”. As 30% of profits brought by online games belong to Facebook, another tendency of company’s development is supposed to be directed on improvements in the gaming platform. Therefore, the network’s revenue is predicted to increase from $4 billion in 2012 to $20 billion in 2016. Regarding further market penetration, such countries as China, North Korea, Iran and Syria could become a target market for Facebook (Hunter 1).

All in all, in spite of the recent incredible growth of Facebook, the company is assumed to reach its limits soon. The above mentioned experts’ suggestions are mostly based on Facebook ability to monetize successfully its users and on the direct relation between the growth of market share and increase in profits. Therefore, creation of such revenue models, which will justify the $70 to $100 billion valuation of the company, should become the high priority for Facebook.