Facebook and The Diffusion of Innovation Theory (Week 12)

In this week's blog post we will be examining the social media giant, Facebook, through the lens of Everett Rogers' Diffusion of Innovations theory. Facebook officially launched in February of 2004 and was primarily created by Mark Zuckerburg.  The purpose of the site was to provide a platform where Harvard students, exclusively, could connect with each other. Fast forward to 16 years in the future and Facebook is now a an absolute bohemoth that dominates the social media space with an estimated 2.5 billion users. Additionally the company has its hands in other industries as well, as the company has acquired additional assets such as Oculus Virtual Reality, and WhatsApp. How did a small platform that was created for Harvard students take over the world and change the way that humans interact on a global scale? More specifically, how does Facebook's rise fit within the Diffusion of Innovation theory that was laid out by Rogers? Those are the questions that this blog post will seek to answer in a condensed fashion.

The theory of Diffusion of Innovation has four primary tenets: innovation itself, communication channels, time, and a social system. The theory also places emphasis on those who adopt the innovation and at what stage they get on-board. There are early adopters, early majority, late adopters, and lastly, laggards. In this case early adopters are those who hopped on the Facebook train early and were the first to take a chance on the platform despite the fact that it did not have a lot of traction yet, or wide-spread social credibility. For Facebook the early adopters were college students. Not just Harvard students, but students at other universities as well. Once Facebook had success at Harvard the platform was opened up to students at various other universities and the snowball grew larger and larger from there. College students, or those who are in their teens and 20s are often early adopters. They tend to not be stuck in their ways and are on average much more willing to take a chance on something new and uncertain. Especially 16 years ago when, for many people, a great deal of uncertainty still surrounded the internet and the concept of putting personal information online.

As Facebook continued to scale, the site began to capture more and more users that belonged to older age groups. The older the age group, the more late adopters and laggards. But eventually Facebook was able to grow to such an extent that they have now reached every age group, and so their demographic of laggards has now changed. Laggards for Facebook today are now the untapped countries and regions of the world that have yet to accept the platform. Some of these regions are lagging behind due to a lack of resources. However, most of the countries such as China, Iran, Syria, and North Korea, have governments that prohibit citizens to access Facebook. Breaking through this barrier may be the only thing that stands between Facebook and world domination. I say that with a one of sarcasm but the statement also holds truth. China is a nation with 1.4 billion citizens. If we do some math and add that number to Facebook's current user base of 2.5 billion, we get the staggering number of 3.9 billion users. That is literally more than half of the entire world.

Consistent with Rogers' theory, Facebook is an innovative platform that for the most part has done an excellent job of serving as both a communication channel and a social system. Over time the platform has continued to grow exponentially, and because of its ability to fulfill all four tenets of Rogers' theory to the fullest extent, the platform's potential is seemingly limitless.

Source links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations
https://www.omnicoreagency.com/facebook-statistics/
https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&met_y=sp_pop_totl&idim=country:CHN:IND&hl=en&dl=en
https://interestingengineering.com/history-of-facebook