Essay on Facebook: Communication, Networking, Research, and Revenue in Cameroon

Introduction

Facebook is the most popularly used platform in Cameroon for communication in the form of drawings, pictures, videos, and messages with close friends and family members. More so, Facebook is essential for networking, researching, business, organizations, and funders to connect and allow distance learning. Additionally, Facebook generates revenue through selling placements for advertisements on mobile applications and websites for marketers targeting Facebook users; hence most of the income comes from advertising. In Cameroon, the total advertising audience on Facebook is about 3.5 million monthly active users compared to other social media websites (Visnji, 2019). Therefore, it is evident that increasing their platform for a large number of Yaoundé marketers will increase their revenue base. Another area where Facebook receives part of its revenue is from developers of its platform through getting a fee from them in case Facebook uses to conduct a transaction using the developed payment infrastructure (Visnji, 2019). The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate sources of finance that Facebook might acquire to grow and compete with other social networking sites in Yaoundé, Cameroon.

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Commentary

Facebook continues to eat up any third party; it deems to be a threat, especially in the mobile Apps market space. As Facebook continued its exponential growth trend, an entirely new market arose primarily in the Apps market and browser-based extensions that could accomplish several automated tasks. To ensure that Facebook remained in business, and these apps do not pose a threat to their core business, Facebook would either scoop up the App or develop their own. An example is the acquisition of WhatsApp Inc. for $19 billion in 2014. Facebook optimizes its revenue on the users’ ability to generate and consume engaging content. Since content is the new currency, Facebook empowers its users in various ways, such as the creation of Facebook pages and Facebook groups, as a way to encourage users to generate their content.

Facebook groups are just a kind of glorified Facebook pages. Lately, Facebook has shifted its focus on Facebook groups due to their dynamic nature and engaged user interaction, as opposed to pages which tend to be static. For advanced social media managers and Facebook users who wanted to share their content with large communities, Facebook had minimal resources and tools to organize Facebook pages, groups and users. To invite likes for your Facebook page, one had to skim through thousands of random Facebook users and manually invite each user to like your page. A painfully tedious and slow exercise. Therefore, third party developers developed their smart tools to take advantage of the new Facebook API.

The statistics provided by NapoleonCat indicated that as of December 2019, Cameroon Facebook users amounted to 3,650,000 individuals which accounts for about 14.1% of the whole population in Cameroon (DataReportal, 2019). However, statistics from Statcounter indicate that it faces competition from the likes of Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube, among others. Although the competition might seem insignificant, considering the large margin of users, Facebook strives to gain an additional competitive advantage over them.

Figure 1: Social media stats in Cameroon in the last 12 months

Source: Statcounter:2020

Figure 2: Social media stats in Cameroon from July 2019 to July 2020

Source: Statcounter:2020

Figure 3: Social Media advertising audience in Cameroon in January 2019

Source: DataReportal, 2019

Reference

DataReportal (2019). Digital 2019 Cameroon (January 2019) v01. [online] SlideShare. Available at: https://www.slideshare.net/DataReportal/digital-2019-cameroon-january-2019-v01 [Accessed 12 Aug. 2020].

Statcounter (2020). Social Media Stats Cameroon. [online] StatCounter Global Stats. Available at: https://gs.statcounter.com/social-media-stats/all/cameroon [Accessed 12 Aug. 2020].

Visnji, M. (2019). How Facebook Makes Money? [online] Revenues & Profits. Available at: https://revenuesandprofits.com/how-facebook-makes-money/ [Accessed 12 Aug. 2020].