Global Strategic Management Report: Facebook's Strategies & Growth

This report provides a comprehensive analysis of Facebook's global strategic management, detailing the strategies and techniques employed by CEO Mark Zuckerberg to achieve market dominance. It examines the business and corporate strategies using Porter's generic strategies model, including cost leadership, differentiation, and differentiation focus. The report also includes an external and internal environment analysis, covering resources, company culture, public image, and a PEST analysis. Strategic tools like the Blue Ocean Strategy and Theory of Change (TOC) are discussed, highlighting their role in Facebook's success. Furthermore, the report elaborates on strategic planning, from formulation to implementation and evaluation, emphasizing Facebook's approach to connecting people globally. The analysis considers the challenges and opportunities faced by Facebook in the global market, providing insights into its journey from a college project to a global social media giant.

Global Strategic
Management

Contents
INTRODUCTION......................................................................................................................3
MAIN BODY.............................................................................................................................3
Business and corporate strategies...........................................................................................3
External and internal environment analysis...........................................................................4
Strategic tools, techniques and models..................................................................................6
Strategic planning...................................................................................................................7
Different levels of strategy.....................................................................................................8
Corporate examples and literature.........................................................................................9
Conclusion and recommendations...........................................................................................10
REFERENCES.........................................................................................................................12

INTRODUCTION
In today’s modern business landscape, the ease of conducting trade at both a domestic
and international level has improved by leaps and bounds due to the effect brought about by
globalization which has blurred the boundaries between different national economies to turn
the world into an interconnected hub. However this has also brought into limelight the need
for business enterprises to rely on proper and efficient formulation of market strategies which
details the flow and method of operations which a company undertakes in a target market
segment. Strategic management is the process through which firms develop and formulate
plans, policies, strategies, systems and procedures in order to optimize and boost the
performance and profitability of the company with the main aim of making the company
succeed by becoming more competitive over their rivals (Desai, 2019).
There are many benefits and roles which are facilitated by the use of effective
strategic management by companies nowadays as it helps cope up with the large number of
sudden and unforeseen disruptions and business threats that lurk in the external and internal
environment and this concept of business administration also helps improve employee morale
and loyalty through clear cut defining and assignment of objectives (Köseoğlu and Parnell,
2020). On a global level, strategic management is needed if firms are looking to succeed with
small resources and fulfill their ambitious goals as it helps define and establish the type of
activities to be undertaken in the foreign markets and one of the best examples of explain this
line of thought is Facebook which started from humble beginnings and is now one of the de
facto faces of social media worldwide.
Facebook is a massively popular American social service network service which falls
under the portfolio of the company, Meta Platforms and it was established in 2004 by Mark
Zuckerberg, Chris Hughes, Eduardo Saverin and Dustin Moskovitz with its current day
headquarters being in Menlo Park, California. This report will detail the journey that
Facebook experienced in its journey to dominate in the global business space with emphasis
on the types of strategies and strategic planning techniques used by the CEO Mark
Zuckerberg.

MAIN BODY
Business and corporate strategies
Facebook has come a very long way from the nearly two decade back timeframe
where Mark Zuckerberg and some of his friends founded the basic structure of the modern
day social media interface and communications giant in their Harvard dorm rooms and one of
the major reasons behind its blockbuster success has been the strategic management skills
displayed by its current CEO, Mark Zuckerberg (Meta Platforms, 2022). The business and
corporate strategic used by him which have been responsible for positive growth for
Facebook internationally have been detailed below using Porter’s generic strategies model in
which he described major strategic directions for firms to take to gain competitive edge in the
market based on prioritization of available resources and long term vision of the company.
 Cost Leadership – This is one of the most important strategies listed by porter
according to which a firm can attain competiveness and boost in sales as well as
revenue if it lowers the cost of their products and sell them at a margin below their
rivals to undercut them from the market (Nielsen, Henriksen and Børgesen, 2018).
Mark Zuckerberg made sure to use this strategy as his main weapon against other
social media firms as he prioritized gaining more customers and expanding the reach
of Facebook by partnering with IT solutions and network providers globally and has
allowed the basic features of Facebook to be fully free of cost. This has paid rich
dividends as now Facebook enjoys huge reach and more than 2 billion daily active
users.
 Differentiation – This strategy is more concerned with developing new innovative
capabilities and gaining advantage in the target market by making the products and
services offered more attractive and valuable than those of other competitors. Mark
Zuckerberg found his initial success with Facebook through his strategic decisions to
keep the user interface of the social media service very simple and easy to understand
and Facebook has gained rapid market popularity because of its user friendly design,
promotional tools and communication facilities which might be common now but
Mark was the one to do everything first in the market on a big scale.
 Differentiation focus – Mark Zuckerberg has continued to focus the current strategic
operations of Facebook to stay ahead of the competition. The company’s recent focus
on NFT’s and Metaverse which is a virtual world powered by augmented and virtual

reality technologies promises to make waves in the future as well as Facebook is
becoming the market pioneer in this field.
External and internal environment analysis
An internal environment analysis and a PEST analysis have been described below for
the purpose of analysis.
Internal environmental analysis
 Resources of the company – Mark has raised funding multiple times for Facebook
and has utilized its limited resources in the early days of its days and focused on
product streamlining and innovation to drive the market potential of the company.
 Company culture – Mark has also worked hard to instil core values of the company
with its establishment and workers and despite complaints of work crunch and
unhealthy hustle in many locations of Facebook offices, he has done well in making
sure he communicates with branch heads himself and appreciate employees
personally who perform well.
 Public image and goodwill – Facebook focus on corporate social responsibility and
various cultural campaigns has borne fruit as it has become a popular part of pop
culture and daily life in many countries. Mark has gained trust of the public and has
saved Facebook from controversies many times through acts such as government and
charity donations.
PEST analysis
 Political – The company has become so large in such a limited amount of time that
governments around the globe have been sanctioning and subjecting it to lawsuits
such as anti-trust violations, calling it out for data security and Mark has helped
mitigate this problem by making sure the data collected by Facebook is ethical and
privately stored and the company operations do no strangle the market.
 Economic – Facebook has become an integral part of the way economic processes
take place as many companies responsible for researching metrics such as GDP,
income distribution and public trends use Facebook data. Mark has also helped
stabilize the stock value of Facebook many times a recent case being him acting upon
the 250 billion dollar shedding of Meta's stock value in February, 2022 (Facebook
has an innovation problem, 2022

 Social – From getting caught in political scandals, breach of securities and getting
accused for being a contact ground for organized crimes, Mark Zuckerberg has had
his plate full for a minute. However he has done well in using marketing strategies to
keep users hooked on the platform and has over the years bolstered the firm's social
security and framework.
 Technological – Facebook has encountered many problems in sustaining a large user
base and keeping itself technologically superior in the social media market and Mark
Zuckerberg’s vision and strategies have helped solved this problem many times
through his decisions to invest in content marketing tools, gaming and now, virtual
reality
Strategic tools, techniques and models
In order to survive in a market like communications technology and social media where
cut-throat competition exists and the barrier to entry is not very high nowadays due to
rampant tools of software and app development being made available for free, one has to
apply tools of strategic management (Daidj, 2018). Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg has
employed various strategic tools and formulated many important techniques which have
played a vital role in making Facebook the giant it is today and increase its organizational
performance over a long period of time. Some of the major tools and techniques formulate
and used by him are described below. Blue Ocean Strategy – This is a modern day approach to business planning and
strategic approaches to conduct trade on a global level wherein firms focus on gaining
methods of competitive differentiation and display cost leadership behaviour in order
to create new market niches from scratch and compete in markets without any rules
and competition. Mark Zuckerberg has used this approach quite well over the past
decade and it has helped improve the fortune and performance of Facebook on an
unprecedented level. Mark upstaged one of Facebook's biggest rivals, MySpace by
catering to the same set of customers but by offering a broader picture. Facebook
created a new marketplace where people could post authentic personal information
and connect themselves globally to virtually anybody through friend suggestion
feature which made it the first social media company in the market where businesses
could cater to their target audience with precision and efficiency. Most of the features
were also free which helped Facebook dominate the new market it created through

innovation and strategic thinking (Meta: Facebook’s Pivot to the Metaverse. A
Dystopia or Blue Ocean Utopia? 2020).
 Theory of change (TOC) – This strategic approach is vital in ensuring that the
firm's long term goals and vision are setup with the aim of performing well in the
chosen market segment and theory of change is a technique of strategic management
which involves establishing of a long term goal and then undergoing a backwards
dawn formulation of plans and strategies to ensure that the short term goals are
directly helping in achieving this long term vision. Mark over the years has worked
towards the long term vision of making Facebook a communications giant which
connects people across the globe with sheer ease and in order to do so, he has
strategically partnered with various internet service providers, cloud servers and
undertaken activities such as building a content marketing analytics platform which
have all helped achieve his ambitions for the company.
Strategic planning
In order to ensure the success of a business, it is necessary that its activities and
operations are planned and executed in a proper manner and devoid of major errors which is
where strategic planning is a very important concept for companies to grasp (Elliott-Engel,
Westfall-Rudd and Corkins, 2021). It is the process through which business strategies are
formulated, designed and ultimately implemented in the organization and Facebook's growth
and market dominance over the past decade can be attributed firmly to the strategic planning
and frameworks put in place by its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. There were many elements and
considerations that were measures and researched by Facebook's competent workforce and
the way Mark created, developed and designed Facebook's strategic plans is explained in
detail below with the help of stages of strategic planning.
 Formulation of strategy – Mark started Facebook as a college side project but later
on the ambitiously setup the vision of the company to become the first service I the
market that facilitates users to connect and express themselves globally. The strategies
that made Facebook succeed were all formulated by Mark by keeping in mind the
original vision of the firm such as up scaling the business and focused on building a
simple to learn interface and build strategic systems about making customers focus on
personalised content.

 Strategic implementation – After the due formulation of the long term vision of the
company going forward, the implementation of plans by Mark was also made across
many systems of Facebook after due considerations as the company's user interface
was very simple and had strategically implemented features built to attract and sustain
visitors such as own timeline with customization options and different communities
built on global mutual interest.
 Strategy evaluation – The initial years of Facebook were successful in driving
competition such as Myspace and Orkut out of the market through strategic planning
and focusing on ocean blue business approach. Mark after the implementation of his
plans for the company carefully evaluated both the internal and external environment
for betterment of business activities as he saw the success of Google analytics and
designed Facebook insights as a competitor in the content metrics department. The
CEO is also doing evaluations constantly in current time as Facebook is spearheading
an entry into the world of virtual reality with the name rebrand to Metaverse which is
a careful step taken after evaluating Facebook's prior experimentation in the field of
communications and VR technology market segment (Why you should care about
Facebook’s big push into the Metaverse, 2022).
Different levels of strategy
Although successful, several strategic developments that happened under Mark
Zuckerberg's eyes have had mixed effects and impacts and the critical analysis of different
levels of strategies used by him is presented herein.
 Innovation strategies – This theory of strategy formulation involves the creation of
new products and services with enough value involved to bring in new customers and
revenue streams (Nambisan, 2020). The CEO of Facebook has time and again
displayed that development of an innovative framework has been his priority as
Facebook has pioneered global communications and features like messenger
applications and mobile clients. The recent innovation labelled Metaverse which aims
to make virtual spaces online has been met with backlash as the move has been
deemed delusional and unnecessary by many.
 Functional level – These are the plans and policies which affect the bottom line of
the business and are concerned with the overall functioning of different business
departments such as finance, marketing, advertisements and storage and inventory

management. Mark has spent a great deal to advertise Facebook as a service connects
very person on this planet with each other and this has resulted in massive worldwide
popularity but the company has also been labelled as the reason behind social media
addiction and lack of physical connection in modern society.
 Business level – These are the next level of strategic formulation which is usually
done by the senior managers of the company with the aim of developing long term
competitive edge for the firm so that it continues on the path of profitability. Being
the CEO of Facebook, Mark has spearheaded a lot of strategic projects and found new
ways for his company to grow with a great example being providing a robust
marketing and promotional platform to businesses at a nominal price which is
supplemented by the large public data the firm gets from its daily users. However, the
company has also been hit with allegations of privacy breach and misuse of data
which is concerning.
 Corporate level – The highest level of strategies are formed by the top management
and are primarily concerned with the diversification and establishment of the vision
and missions of the company and take care of change management. Mark has changed
and altered the current vision of the company by rebranding under the name Meta and
focusing on virtual reality but the move has been criticized due to its controversial
nature and harmful impact on people's social behaviour going forward.
Corporate examples and literature
The current standing of Facebook cannot be denied as it is undoubtedly the market
leader in the world of social media and enjoys a lot of daily users with a strong retention rate
which is a combination of its friendly interface along with the many utilities provided by the
platform for all types of users and business owners such as Facebook insight which provides
metrics and analytics. However there have been various strategic blunders which have made
the company catch fire in the public domain such as being caught in political scams and
scandals which has led to a negative perception in the business world.
According to the words of Kari Paul (2022), Mark Zuckerberg is looking into pushing
Facebook in new directions as he has rebranded the functions and operations of the parent
company and renaming it to 'Meta' while promising to focus on fast moving and futuristic
innovations. He went on record and stated that the future of Facebook is not in social media
connections but in the form of building virtual forms of identity and computerized

interactions which has been met by serious backlash by internal staff and workforce who
have spent a long time of their tenure in building Facebook's vision which has now been
suddenly eroded for a new futuristic ambition of their CEO (‘Live in the future’: Zuckerberg
unveils company overhaul amid shift to Metaverse, 2022).
Going with the opinion of Patrick Gray (2021), Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg have
made splashes in the world of business and social media with the announcement of Metaverse
and have once again stayed ahead of the curve when it comes to competition. However, the
technology which it is promoting and building has serious ethical concerns as the personal
data collected by this virtual space will be almost unlimited and there is no standards for
personal accountability while interacting digitally. The upcoming road for Facebook and it's
CEO is uncertain at best (Why jumping into the metaverse could be a bad idea, 2022).
Conclusion and recommendations
After critically analysing the working of Facebook and the approach of its CEO
currently, one thing is clear that Facebook is indeed a marketing powerhouse which has
managed to stay one step ahead of its competition for a long time and its strategic planning is
always ambitious and futuristic. Despite this however, both the company and Mark
Zuckerberg have also suffered from big drawbacks in the public domain due to the
controversial nature of Metaverse and the company's dubious involvement in politics and
personal data collection. Some recommendations for the future are given herein that will help
Facebook to sustain its market position.
 Establish systems which promote transparency regarding the use and collection of
data on Facebook as the data scandal is still fresh on people's mind
 Regulate the Metaverse and making sure that the digital avatars created by people and
their virtual actions aren't offensive and illegal
 Keeping strategic focus on social media innovations instead of completely changing
the company vision to integrate virtual reality solutions as this is the USP for the
company.
 Establishing multiple key performance indicators (KPI's) in the field of Metaverse and
virtual meet ups to ensure that the progress in this department is healthy as the future
of the VR industry is bright but uncertain.

The above concluded report went into detail regarding the various aspects of global
strategic management that is used by big time companies which are dominant in their market
segments. There was discussion on the various business and corporate strategies that are used
by companies to increase positive business contribution along with analysis of their internal
and external environment using analytical tools like PEST analysis. Tools and techniques of
strategic management were also described such as blue ocean strategy and theory of change
which are very important drivers of company performance. The report was completed with
the description of strategic planning, levels of strategic used by the CEO of social media
companies along with recommendations for these companies to sustain their market position.

REFERENCES
Books and Journals
Desai, C., 2019. Strategy and strategic management. In Management for Scientists. Emerald
Publishing Limited.
Köseoğlu, M.A. and Parnell, J., 2020. The evolution of the intellectual structure of strategic
management between 1980 and 2019. Journal of Strategy and Management.
Nielsen, R.K., Henriksen, T.D. and Børgesen, K., 2018. Management/Leadership: Profession,
Professional, Professionalization. In Professionalizing Leadership (pp. 219-234). Palgrave
Macmillan, Cham.
Daidj, N., 2018. The evolution of strategic management concepts. Handbook of media
management and economics, pp.111-129.
Elliott-Engel, J., Westfall-Rudd, D. and Corkins, C., 2021. Engaging stakeholders in
Extension strategic planning. The Journal of Extension, 59(4), p.3.
Nambisan, S., 2020. Digital innovation and international business. Innovation, pp.1-10.
Online Referencing
Meta Platforms, 2022 [online] available through https://fortune.com/company/facebook/
Facebook has an innovation problem, 2022 [online] available through
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/10/opinion/facebook-stock-meta-innovation.html
Meta: Facebook’s Pivot to the Metaverse. A Dystopia or Blue Ocean Utopia?, 2022 [online]
available through https://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/teaching-materials/meta-facebook-
pivot-to-metaverse/
Why you should care about Facebook’s big push into the Metaverse, 2022 [online] available
through https://www.vox.com/recode/22799665/facebook-metaverse-meta-zuckerberg-
oculus-vr-ar

‘Live in the future’: Zuckerberg unveils company overhaul amid shift to Metaverse, 2022
[online] available through https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/15/meta-mark-
zuckerberg-facebook-metaverse
Why jumping into the metaverse could be a bad idea, 2022 [online] available through
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/why-jumping-into-the-metaverse-could-be-a-bad-idea/