Facebook is one of the largest and most influential social media platforms in the world. As of October 2022, Facebook reported having over 2.96 billion monthly active users worldwide. With such a massive global reach, Facebook has evolved beyond just a platform to connect friends and share life updates into a powerful force that impacts economics, politics, and society.
Given Facebook’s immense size and influence, understanding its core goals and objectives provides insight into the motivations and priorities that guide the platform’s development and growth. Examining what Facebook aims to achieve also reveals the interests and values that shape many of the platform’s controversial policies and practices.
Connecting People and Building Community
Facebook’s foundational goal remains centered on bringing people together and enabling community. As expressed in the company’s official mission statement: “Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.”
This goal of connecting people reflects Facebook’s origin as a platform for college students to interact. Facebook aims to continue facilitating social connections and relationships, both online and offline. Features like Groups, Events, and Community Help enable people to bond over shared identities, interests, causes, and activities.
Facebook invests heavily in developing products and infrastructure to maximize opportunities for meaningful connection and community building. Initiatives like expanding internet access seek to make Facebook a universally accessible platform for human connection.
Enabling Communication and Self-Expression
Related to community building is Facebook’s goal of enabling communication and self-expression. Facebook gives people personalized tools and audiences to communicate their authentic identities, share life moments, and express themselves creatively.
Features like News Feed, Stories, and Reels allow users to share updates and media that convey their personalities. Facebook claims its platform facilitates more human expression than anywhere else in history.
Of course, Facebook recognizes meaningful communication requires some limits. Goals around removing harmful content reflect balancing self-expression with safety.
Delivering Personalized, Relevant Experiences
Facebook also aims to optimize the user experience by delivering personalized, relevant content and features tailored to each person’s interests and relationships.
Algorithms analyze user data and activity to curate an individualized News Feed of popular posts, suggested content, recommendations, advertisements, and notifications. Features like Memories leverage data to resurface meaningful moments for users.
Facebook contends tailoring experiences boosts engagement while also limiting unwanted content. However, personalized experiences raise concerns about filter bubbles and selective exposure.
Supporting Businesses and Commerce
A core Facebook goal involves supporting businesses and commerce. Facebook enables companies to market products, build brands, and engage customers across its family of services.
Tools like Facebook Pages, Instagram business profiles, Meta Business Suite, and Facebook Ad platforms allow businesses of all sizes to promote themselves. Facebook designs services to empower businesses to leverage its social data and reach vast target audiences.
Facebook also facilitates direct commerce and shopping. New features like Shops and payments expand opportunities for businesses to sell products directly via Facebook and Instagram.
Generating Revenue Through Advertising
Facebook’s business and commerce goals ultimately connect to its core revenue model of selling ads. Facebook’s primary objective is to maximize advertising revenue through targeted ads informed by its rich user data.
Businesses pay for the ability to micro-target Facebook’s user base based on demographics, interests, behaviors, and connections. Facebook offers a range of advertising options catering to different marketing objectives and budgets.
Strong revenue from ads enables Facebook to provide services for free while investing in growth. Advertising accounted for over 98% of Facebook’s revenue in 2021.
Developing Future Commerce and Payments
Looking ahead, Facebook aims to further integrate commerce and payments into its services. Initiatives like Facebook Pay, Facebook Financial, and Novi Financial hint at an objective to transition Facebook into a financial ecosystem.
Facebook is developing capabilities for social commerce, digital payments, financial tools, and even a potential cryptocurrency platform. The long-term goal may be making Facebook services central to online financial transactions.
Advancing Technology and Innovation
Facebook aims to continuously innovate and push technological boundaries across a range of fields like artificial intelligence, virtual/augmented reality, connectivity, and hardware.
Facebook Reality Labs conducts research focused on advancing VR/AR technologies. Projects like aquatic fiber optic cables, satellites, and drones aim to provide global internet access.
Major investments in AI research concentrate on machine learning and conversational AI. Facebook’s annual F8 conference demonstrates its latest innovations and developments.
Facebook’s technology objectives align with its growth ambitions. Advancements enable new products and better experiences to attract and engage more users worldwide.
Pioneering the Metaverse
Recently, developing the next evolution of social technology – the metaverse – has become a prime focus. The vaguely defined metaverse represents a new phase of interconnected virtual experiences facilitated by VR/AR, AI, and universal broadband access.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made developing premier metaverse platforms the company’s new North Star following its rebrand to Meta. Major investments into metaverse hardware, software, VR spaces, and consumer devices reflect this strategic priority.
If successful, pioneering and dominating the metaverse would represent Facebook’s next billion-user platform after mobile.
Leveraging Artificial Intelligence
Facebook heavily utilizes artificial intelligence towards a range of goals from improving content recommendations to content moderation. With trillions of data points from billions of users, Facebook’s dataset provides immense potential for AI capabilities.
Facebook AI research has focused on natural language processing, speech recognition, machine translation, conversational agents, and computer vision. AI advancements help Facebook automatically identify and remove harmful content at scale.
Critics question whether Facebook is adequately balancing AI optimization with ethics and human oversight. But AI remains crucial for Facebook’s future innovation and growth.
Shaping Culture and Society
Given Facebook’s enormous global reach, the platform also aims to positively shape culture and society. Facebook’s tools play a role in social movements, political discourse, information access, charitable giving, and more.
Facebook runs targeted campaigns on social issues like voting rights, pandemic safety, and climate change. The company develops features to support well-being and mental health.
Additionally, Facebook monitors trends to ensure it reflects the cultural zeitgeist. For example, expanding gender options for profiles beyond just “male” and “female.”
Empowering Expression and Democratization
Relatedly, Facebook seeks to empower individual expression and democratize communication. Features like Live, Fundraisers, and Community Help democratize broadcasting, grassroots fundraising, and information access.
Facebook highlights its role in amplifying marginalized voices, connecting diasporas, and promoting human rights. Though critics argue Facebook’s practices around censorship and algorithmic bias actually limit open expression.
Promoting News Literacy and Information Integrity
Given the platform’s problems with misinformation, Facebook also aims to promote news literacy and information integrity. This includes fact-checking programs, media literacy campaigns, academic collaborations, and algorithmic solutions.
Facebook employs over 12,000 people focused on safety and security to address platform abuses. Still, experts debate whether Facebook does enough to curb misinformation without infringing on free expression.
Growth and Engagement
Ultimately, all of Facebook’s goals connect back to driving user growth and engagement. More users, more engagement, and more data improves nearly everything Facebook seeks to accomplish from a business, innovation, and impact perspective.
Facebook’s continued growth depends on attracting the next generations of users as older demographics decline. This explains Facebook’s aggressive promotion on young adult platforms like TikTok.
Future platforms like the metaverse offer potential new vectors of growth and engagement beyond Facebook’s mature social media properties.
Addressing Younger User Decline
However, Facebook faces challenges maintaining growth as younger demographics shift to alternative platforms. Polling suggests Facebook suffers from an “older adult” perception among teens and young adults.
Facebook is attempting to combat this by marketing its products on youth-oriented platforms like Twitch and TikTok. But regaining younger generations requires improving Facebook’s uncool reputation.
Entering Developing Markets
Expanding access in developing markets represents Facebook’s other major growth avenue. Efforts to deliver free basic internet and Facebook services offer growth opportunities among underserved populations.
Users in Asia, Africa, and South America represent the bulk of Facebook’s recent growth. Tailoring Facebook’s services and infrastructure to these markets remains a priority.
Maximizing Long-Term Profit
While Facebook does not prioritize profits as highly as other tech giants like Apple, generating strong profitability enables the company’s long-term objectives.
Robust profits allow Facebook to invest heavily in R&D, hire top talent, enter new product spaces, and weather periods of uncertainty. Facebook maintains enviable operating margins of over 30% in most quarters.
Facebook’s high-margin advertising business should continue fueling profitable growth. New monetization options around payments and commerce may provide additional profitable revenue streams.
Delivering Value to Shareholders
As a publicly traded company, Facebook seeks to deliver consistent value to shareholders through sustained high growth and profitability.
Strong financial results boost Facebook’s stock price and total shareholder returns. Growth fuels investor confidence in the company’s future prospects and ability to generate return.
Facebook balances shareholder value with its broader mission. But scrutinizes metrics like daily active users, average revenue per user, and earnings per share.
Maintaining Elite Industry Position
Strong profits enable Facebook to maintain its competitive position atop the social media industry. Facebook can absorb losses across futuristic bets like VR while dominating present-day social networking.
High spending on technical talent, acquisitions, and blocking competitive threats helps Facebook withstand attacks on its market dominance. Protecting its network effects and ecosystem insulates Facebook’s business.
Conclusion
Facebook sits at the intersection of technology, business, and society. As such, the platform juggles an array of goals from driving engagement to developing innovative technologies and shaping culture.
Ultimately, Facebook strives to bring value to users, businesses, shareholders, and communities by realizing its vision for an interconnected global community. But the controversies surrounding Facebook demonstrate the challenges balancing these goals in practice.
As Facebook continues evolving into Meta, its future success will be determined by how well it navigates its immense responsibilities in relation to its core goals and values.