Facebook Stakeholder Analysis Report: MBA501, Kaplan Business School

This report provides a comprehensive stakeholder analysis of Facebook, examining the company's vision, mission, and recent developments, challenges, and industry trends. The report employs a stakeholder view model to identify key stakeholder groups, including active users, advertisers, employees, and the government, and delves into their roles, responsibilities, and behaviors. It explores the dynamics of these relationships, offering insights into how Facebook manages its diverse stakeholder landscape. The analysis further categorizes stakeholders based on their influence and interest, providing a nuanced understanding of their positions. The report includes an executive summary, table of contents, introduction to Facebook, stakeholder view model, and a detailed analysis of four selected stakeholder groups, making it a valuable resource for understanding the strategic complexities of Facebook's business operations.

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Management
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Executive summary
The report was presented to discuss about the analysis of stakeholders and their
various roles and responsibilities associated considering the business organisation named
Facebook. The report also discussed about the various trends and challenges along with the
stakeholder view considering the importance of employees, active users of the social
network, advertisers and the Government. Their behaviours and motives were identified,
which also assisted in understanding their roles and responsibilities, furthermore, ensured
managing them altogether to facilitate the business functioning as a whole.

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Table of Contents
Introduction to Facebook...........................................................................................................5
Stakeholder view........................................................................................................................6
Stakeholder analysis for the four selected stakeholder groups..................................................8

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Introduction to Facebook
Facebook Inc. is a major American company specialised in the management of social
media and social networking services. The services delivered by the company are accessed
with the use of internet and has provided better connectivity including the use of personal
computers, laptops, tablets and smartphones. The users of the social networking site are liable
to create a customised profile that can reveal about themselves, furthermore, allow them to
post pictures, videos and other multimedia components through sharing with other active
users of the social media platform (Bakshy, Messing and Adamic 2015).
The mission of the organisation is to provide the people with power to develop
community and bring the world close together to foster social inclusion. The individuals
engaged with the social networking website have managed to use the services for the purpose
of staying connected with their family members, friends and even discover what is being
going on, furthermore share and express themselves, what matters to them the most.
The recent developments of Facebook include filing a suit against the two App
developers for the purpose of preventing Click Injection Fraud. The company even managed
to outsource two technologies for identifying the identical and similar kinds of photos and
videos that are posted on the social networking website and often led to redundancy of these
posts (Rieder 2013). Recent developments also include improving the security level through
release of organic targeted posts, which has helped the users to share exclusive content with
the specific individuals who are interested with the brand and are allowed to split test new
content before the posts go online publicly.
The major challenges that are currently faced by the company are the monetization
pressure, more bad headlines, issues and complexities related to the corporate governance and
declining level of trust in Tech. There are a lot of negative stories emerging nowadays on the

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Facebook wall and even the popular accounts on Instagram also managed the scale the level
of scrutiny as the News Feed of Facebook. The monetization pressures have declined the
level of engagement of individuals on the main news feed of Facebook, due to which, the
company has experienced pressure to monetise the products and services (Lienert et al.
2013). The Governance issues are also considered as major challenges, which can also
contribute to the lack of control over the business functions and processes, furthermore,
deteriorate the overall business performance and ability to attain the desired level of profit
and competitive advantage in business. Another major issue or challenge could be the
hacking attack from Russia on Facebook, which also led to lack of trust. The declining trust
in Tech has also been another major challenges experienced by Facebook, which has been
dependent upon the attention of users and this could sometimes fall out of favour (Missonier
and Loufrani-Fedida 2014).
The latest industry trends of Facebook include the increase in private groups and
accounts, which has enabled Facebook to invest on the various new features including
Facebook Groups and get engaged with businesses with the help of maintaining a business
page and through updating of stories and even by posting live videos within the group to
develop social learning units too. The conversational commerce has also been a major trend
at present on Facebook, which has helped in building messaging chatbots and at the same
time, allowed for introducing Facebook messenger that can be installable on the websites
(Yang 2014). Another effective and most important trend could also be the management of
transparency, which could enable battling privacy related concerns and also the concerns
associated with the sharing of data and information, thereby, create convenience to report any
form of harassment experienced.

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Stakeholder view
The most important stakeholders of Facebook include the users of the social
networking website, advertisers, employees and the Government. There are other
stakeholders too such as the shareholders or investors, employees, community and also the
Government and other regulatory bodies. The stakeholder model has been though represented
with Faceboook Company being present at the middle and the various stakeholders
surrounding it (Haigh, Brubaker and Whiteside 2013).

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Active users of Facebook – Considering the fact that Facebook currently consists of a huge
number of monthly active users and thus it has been considered as one of the largest social
media networking website. The active users have been considered as the most important
stakeholders because of their surfing and remaining online, Facebook has achieved immense
popularity in the marketplace and also has established a sense of trust and loyalty among the
people all over the world (De Brucker, Macharis and Verbeke 2013). The interface has been
made much easier and convenient so that it can easily accessed by the users and the
popularity of the social network gradually increased over time.
Advertisers – The advertisers, on the other hand, have been associated with the roles and
responsibilities of managing advertisements and ensured pay for such kinds of services as the
social networking website consists of a huge numbers of customers. Without the presence of
huge number of active users, the company would likely face loss, which has not been the
problem till now, because of the huge numbers of people who remain active most of the times
on tis popular and established social media network (Saxton and Waters 2014). The
advertisers have put their money for best use and even ensured management of privacy for

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the personal data and information of the individuals, furthermore, resulted in reaping the
maximum benefits from the user of services.
Employees– Another most important stakeholder are the employees of the organisation, who
are delegated with the roles and responsibilities of managing and well controlling the various
functions and processes associated with the improvement of social media networking services
along with actively engaging with the users and responding to their queries too within quick
time (Bonsón and Ratkai 2013). The needs and interests of the employees as the important
stakeholders also include development and focus on career, maintaining a good work9ng
environment and corporate culture along with managing consistent approaches to ensure that
more users are actively involved.
Government–The Government has been considered as another important stakeholder as this
body has regulated the implementation of various laws, legislations, rules and regulations to
facilitate the social media business functioning for Facebook. The company has ensured
following the government laws, rules and regulations and even the policies and principles
implemented to ensure keeping the community safe and prevent disclosure of important and
confidential data and information too (Einwiller and Steilen 2015). The corporate social
responsibility strategies have also been implemented by Facebook with the involvement of
Government to put efforts and ensure protection of environment and contribute to the positive
impact on the community too.
Stakeholder analysis for the four selected stakeholder groups
Considering the status and behaviours of the different stakeholders of Facebook, it is
important for the company to ensure that their needs and preferences are fulfilled and they are
allowed to overcome the competitive threats within the industry and facilitate cooperative
potential. The stakeholder analysis has helped in keeping them informed about the

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organisational policies, values and beliefs and also their performances are monitored along
with managed to ensure performance of theirs to the best potential and furthermore, address
the interests of the stakeholders within the project plan, policy, programs and actions to be
undertaken by the organisation (Ji et al. 2017).
From the stakeholder analysis, it could be understood that the ‘hold’ aspect means
holding the current position and it is Mark Zuckerberg, who is the CEO of the company, i.e.,
Facebook. The employees of the company are important stakeholders, who fall in the
‘defensive’ category and are responsible for keeping the accounts of users secure and defend
those accounts from any external threats that can hinder the privacy, confidentiality and
security of data and information. They can also defend the accounts of individuals from
threats lick hacking and ensure that the posts made by users and other things shared by them
remain safe and confidential (Kim, Kim and Nam 2014). The customers here are the active
users of Facebook who are associated with the changing of rules and often influencing the
owners of the company and social networking website to implement changes for the
betterment of social media services. They remain active on the social media platform, due to
which, the company generates most of the revenue and in case, customers’ needs change
from time to time, it becomes important for the organisation to change certain rules and make
sure to cater the needs of clients easily (Bakshy, Messing and Adamic 2015). Lastly, the
advertisers fall in the offensive category and they mostly exploit the resources to market the
services and promote those for influencing more users to become part of the largest social
networking site.

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References
Bakshy, E., Messing, S. and Adamic, L.A., 2015. Exposure to ideologically diverse news and
opinion on Facebook. Science, 348(6239), pp.1130-1132.
Bonsón, E. and Ratkai, M., 2013. A set of metrics to assess stakeholder engagement and
social legitimacy on a corporate Facebook page. Online Information Review, 37(5), pp.787-
803.
De Brucker, K., Macharis, C. and Verbeke, A., 2013. Multi-criteria analysis and the
resolution of sustainable development dilemmas: A stakeholder management approach.
European journal of operational research, 224(1), pp.122-131.
Einwiller, S.A. and Steilen, S., 2015. Handling complaints on social network sites–An
analysis of complaints and complaint responses on Facebook and Twitter pages of large US
companies. Public Relations Review, 41(2), pp.195-204.
Haigh, M.M., Brubaker, P. and Whiteside, E., 2013. Facebook: examining the information
presented and its impact on stakeholders. Corporate Communications: An International
Journal, 18(1), pp.52-69.
Ji, Y.G., Li, C., North, M. and Liu, J., 2017. Staking reputation on stakeholders: How does
stakeholders’ Facebook engagement help or ruin a company’s reputation?. Public Relations
Review, 43(1), pp.201-210.
Kim, D., Kim, J.H. and Nam, Y., 2014. How does industry use social networking sites? An
analysis of corporate dialogic uses of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn by industry
type. Quality & Quantity, 48(5), pp.2605-2614.
Lienert, J., Schnetzer, F. and Ingold, K., 2013. Stakeholder analysis combined with social
network analysis provides fine-grained insights into water infrastructure planning processes.
Journal of environmental management, 125, pp.134-148.

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Missonier, S. and Loufrani-Fedida, S., 2014. Stakeholder analysis and engagement in
projects: From stakeholder relational perspective to stakeholder relational ontology.
International Journal of Project Management, 32(7), pp.1108-1122.
Rieder, B., 2013, May. Studying Facebook via data extraction: the Netvizz application. In
Proceedings of the 5th annual ACM web science conference (pp. 346-355). ACM.
Saxton, G.D. and Waters, R.D., 2014. What do stakeholders like on Facebook? Examining
public reactions to nonprofit organizations’ informational, promotional, and community-
building messages. Journal of Public Relations Research, 26(3), pp.280-299.
Yang, R.J., 2014. An investigation of stakeholder analysis in urban development projects:
Empirical or rationalistic perspectives. International Journal of Project Management, 32(5),
pp.838-849.