Two corporate lessons to learn from Facebook’s decade of success

Facebook turned 10 last week, marking a decade since it stole the social media crown from MySpace.

Initially aimed at university students, it’s become such a runaway success that everyone from children to grandmothers to alleged criminal masterminds have a profile on there.

It’s such a cool company, there’s even been a film made about it – a sensible move when you consider it had 1.23 billion monthly active users at the end of last year, based on company data.

But no matter how hip it might seem, much of the social network giant’s success is down to factors that could really benefit more traditional corporations.

CBR asked some tech firms what the biggest lessons they’ve learned from Facebook are, and it centred around two things:

User Experience

"We began to see customers asking for social capabilities in the late 2000s, as social media really began to get a foothold," says Stephen Mann, of enterprise cloud company ServiceNow. "We then introduced Livefeed [a Facebook-like newsfeed], chat, and public and corporate social tool integrations.

"Why couldn’t our IT experiences in work be similar to the ones we have on Facebook, or Amazon, with easy to navigate interfaces and drop down menus?

"Facebook in particular has been one of the consumer services that have set the bar for the user experience. Creating something that is just so easy to use, whether on a computer or mobile device, where the user doesn’t really see that they are using IT. And unlike much corporate software, the customer actually wants to use it."

Richard Acreman, CEO of technology services company WM360, adds: "Simple tools like instant messenger, to supplement emails, or a central news feed that allows employees to flag relevant developments to their whole team at the click of a button, can go a long way towards improving functionality and user experience simultaneously."