With a plethora of social media websites out
there from Facebook to Google+ to “you name it, we've got it” one has to ask
how they all got up and running and are still in business. I know that they say
that anyone can start a website but in order to be successful you need to have
some kind of business acumen, seed capital from somewhere, marketing help, and
lots of other things I would guess to be successful. We have all heard the
story of Facebook and its origins in a bedroom in Harvard. But in order for Facebook
to grow beyond that it needed people willing to invest in it and had money
injected into it from various sources such as Peter Theil of Paypal and Accel
Partners (wikipedia.com, 2014). Bodies like these didn't do it out of the
goodness of their hearts. They believed in the product and felt it would be
successful. Facebook had to present a business model to such people to show,
what was the concept it had, how it would grow, provide budgets for its
business, how it would market itself. Accel Partners for example put $12
million into Facebook back in 2005 (wikipedia.com, 2014). I am sure it wouldn’t
have unless it was convinced by what had been presented to it. By putting in
seed capital they provided Facebook in the early days with the monies to grow and
develop into the site it is now. To allow it to hire the expertise it needed
across all aspects of its business, Further down the line even Microsoft
injected monies into it (wikipedia.com, 2014). You
don’t have to have big backers to make launching a social media site possible,
and building your own community. There are sites on the web that allow people
to do this. Sites like ehow.com show you how to start a social media website
and guide you through all the steps necessary.
With a site up and running and hopefully making money profit then raises its head. This can come in different forms. It can be a purely revenue based item as in advertising revenue which is the main revenue from social media sites; it can be profit from the point of view of the number of hits or subscribers using the site. The general public can profit from having such a site available. They can benefit from, for example, being able to communicate with friends on say WhatsApp to keeping in touch with friends on Facebook. People who have invested in the site from say private investors providing seed capital to the general public buying shares will see profits in the form of dividends or increase in the value of their shares. When we talk of SM sites we are not talking of industries that produce widgets. It is in an electronic format, intangible, all bits and bytes, sent across cyberspace. The way it is developing and what has been pointed out in previous blogs a huge portion of the world’s population is engaged, and is continuing to grow, with these sites and enjoying what they offer. We are all consumers of such sites from messaging with family and friends on WhatsApp to tweeting about the world around us on Twitter, the list is endless.
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