Facebook was launched in February 2004 by Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg with his classmates Dustin Moskovitz, Eduardo Saverin, and Chris Hughes, as an alternative to the traditional student directory.

Initially, the founders limited Facebook membership to Harvard students. Since 2006, it has been available to any email address globally, and has since become the largest social networking website, surpassing MySpace.

Facebook members use Facebook to keep in touch with their old friends and meet new ones, and to keep them informed about recent events. Members can easily update their status, share pictures, blog posts and videos, and also promote upcoming events.

With the explosive growth of Facebook, Facebook is becoming its own social media software development platform. Members can access a large number of applications made for all purposes, and most of them are available at no cost. Facebook is already the number 1 photo-sharing app on the web, attracting more than twice the traffic of its main competitors combined. Facebook’s events app invited three times as many people as other prominent websites.

The use of Facebook has evolved significantly with an expanded range of uses. Activity and loyalty are two key features of the Facebook community. More than half of active users return to Facebook daily, spending an average of 20 minutes on the site. The research showed that the click-through rate is 10 to 20 times higher on Facebook than on simple banner ads.

Due to its heavy usage patterns, Facebook is a data-rich site for researchers to gather statistics and trends. User data mining application tools have been developed for Facebook to collect details about members’ friends in diagrams or graphs, which display Facebook friend statistics, including the ratio of male to female users, the percentage of people who got married, how many people are under the age of 20-40, their horoscope, which popular groups most friends recently joined, as well as their locations can be visualized in colorful graphs, with full control over which stats are private or public with just one mouse click on the control page.

In conclusion, Facebook not only covers hundreds of millions of active users, but also provides numerous ways for business owners to reach these users legitimately and has provided an amazing online platform for advertising or building brand awareness. The company can target what everyone is paying attention to on Facebook. Brands and businesses must learn how to use Facebook to enable new ways of communicating with their consumers and offer new opportunities for collaboration and knowledge sharing.