Facebook



Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission - to make the world more open and connected.

-- Mark Zuckerberg

About
Launched in 2004 by tech giant Mark Zuckerberg and several Harvard classmates, Facebook is a social networking platform originally designed for Harvard students (under the name thefacebook). Eventually Facebook expanded to other prestigious schools from Boston to California, then to all universities and, ultimately, to anyone over the age of 13.

According to Alexa.com, as of March 2015 Facebook has the second highest traffic of any website globally, behind only Google. Facebook lists its total daily active user base as over 890 million, and its total monthly user base as nearly 1.4 billion, more than 75% of which are outside of the U.S. and Canada. As of December 2014, it was valued at more than $220 billion.

How to Use Facebook
It would be difficult to cover the complete list of functions that a website as monolithic as Facebook contains. Instead, here are a few of the key features that the site offers as a form of social networking.

Status Posts
Status Posts comprise the majority of Facebook's immediately noticeable functionality. Any individual profile or page is able to post status updates at any time, which will then be broadcast our to the news feeds of friends and followers. When posting a status, there are five main options to consider:
 * 1) Photos can be attached to any status post. This is useful not only for sharing pictures of important people or events, but also for advertising upcoming events or functions
 * 2) Tagging gives users the ability to tag people or pages in their post. If the other party has the feature enabled, it will then show up on their timeline.
 * 3) Feelings are a relatively recent addition that allow users to include a small smiley or emoticon with their post as a visual representation of what they may be feeling, doing, watching, etc.
 * 4) Geotagging allows users to pinpoint the location from which the post is being made.
 * 5) Privacy is built into each post. Before posting, users can select the range to which the post will be broadcast (e.g. Friends Only, Public, etc.)

Pages
Once Facebook began to take the consistency and validity of personal profiles more seriously, Pages became the accept manner by which corporations and organizations could still have a presence on the website. Like personal profiles, Pages can have a profile and cover photo, host events, post status updates, and share content. Pages also have extra analytics tools for businesses.

Examples of potential uses for pages for student affairs professionals include student programming boards, residence halls, and student organizations. Be sure to check with supervisors and/or marketing departments to ensure all official criteria are met.

Groups
Groups are informal collections of Facebook users on virtually any topic imaginable. Within groups, users can share photos, status updates, and events, as well as selected the desired level of privacy for the group (e.g. whether or not users not currently in the group would need permission from a group administrator to join).

Where as pages are meant to be official representation channels for larger organizations, groups are intended to be used as avenues for discussion among like-minded sets of Facebook users.

Apps
There are two main apps associated with Facebook:

Facebook Mobile
This is, straightforwardly, the mobile app version of the Facebook platform. It is far and away the most used and reliable app for browsing Facebook and managing groups or pages. It is available on both Android and iOS.

Facebook Messenger
Until recently, Facebook included messaging support on its main mobile app. Facebook, however, created a standalone app for using the Facebook Messenger system. On its initial launch it was optional but was slowly made the only way to message other Facebook users on a mobile device. There were initial privacy and security concerns with the app, but Facebook maintains that those claims were overblown.