10 years after entering the stock market..Facebook is still a basic platform, despite the damage to its image

Facebook has transformed from an emerging company whose shares are rising steadily after entering the stock market ten years ago, to a group whose image has faded and its popularity deteriorated, but it is still an indispensable necessity in the world of social media and intends to remain so in the world of Metaverse.
According to “Al-Franciah”, the photo taken on May 18, 2012 appears to be from a bygone era.
That day, Mark Zuckerberg rang the bell of the Nasdaq electronic exchange in the middle of one of the squares of Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, in front of thousands of employees, who applauded standing for their manager’s symbolic step.
“Facebook at that point was a modern way for people to communicate, and Zuckerberg was still considered a young leader,” says Carolina Milanesi of Creative Strategies.
She adds that Zuckerberg’s image “has become associated today with and the concept of political manipulation,” noting that “Facebook has become a data-hungry company.”
Although the decline in the company’s growth is worrying, as the shares of Facebook, which adopted the “meta” designation, have lost half their value since the beginning of September, the number of active users of the network is not less than 2.94 billion people per month, and it is still increasing.
Independent expert David Bechry notes that “Facebook maintains a competitive advantage thanks to the number of users,” adding that the company’s management “has always focused on attracting the largest possible number of users.”
Keith Kakadia, founder of the marketing agency Socially In, which specializes in social media, confirms that “small advertisers … may think that the use of Facebook is declining and that no one is browsing it, but this impression is incorrect.”
In addition, Facebook was affected by the update of the operating system “iOS” for “iPhone” devices last year, as this update prevented it from being able to collect part of the data of users of these phones, but this procedure did not negatively affect the importance of the network for advertisers.
“We always recommend using Facebook in branding strategies, and the majority of these brands rely on the social network to post their ads,” Kakadia says.
“But what is actually happening is that young people, between the ages of 13 and 18, are starting to abandon Facebook,” but they are mostly active on other platforms, including Instagram, which is owned by Meta, and “therefore, they are part of Facebook’s strategy.”
Before Facebook, many platforms tried to test the world of social media, from Friendster to MySpace, but none of them achieved sustainable success because they could not keep pace with the rapid development in the sector and did not sufficiently supervise the content published on them.
Since that stage, a large number of social media platforms have been launched, but most of them are now specialized in a specific category.
“Our ambition is not to be as big as Facebook,” says Jeremy Mane, co-founder of the altruistic social platform Troy, which is currently used by 10,000 people.
He explains that the network’s goal is to confirm “there is an alternative” to Facebook or Twitter.
As for the networks owned by conservative parties, which have witnessed a significant proliferation since 2016, including “Barler”, “Giter” and the modern “Truth Social” of Donald Trump, “they did not reach the size, which makes them indispensable networks.”
“I don’t think the competitors got it wrong,” says Carolina Milanesi. “Facebook has simply become this big and reached this importance at the right time.”
Facebook, which is still at the forefront of social networks, aspires to remain so in the parallel virtual world that Zuckerberg is betting on, so much so that he changed the name of his group to “Meta Platforms”.
Meta plans to allocate at least ten billion dollars annually to create and organize its own version of Metaverse, to establish itself as the reference in the virtual world.
Keith Kakadia believes in this move even if “brands haven’t started thinking about how to engage” with this new space, he says.
He adds that “Facebook has been involved since 2014 in the world of Metaverse by buying Oculus, a company specializing in virtual reality helmets, but no one understood this step” at that point, noting that “Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg were always ahead of others.”
“The company’s strategy is to be an essential element in brands entering the world of Metaverse, as happened ten years ago when the company resorted to opening pages through Facebook,” David Becherry notes.
For Carolina Milanesi, the goal is for the company to be a leader in the metaverse world, ie “those that will set and enforce the rules”.