- 200 million+ active users, announced by Zuckerberg in April. The next 100 million took less than eight months.
- Two-thirds of the user base is outside the United States. Adoption is now heaviest across Europe, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Latin America.
- The site is the largest photo-sharing service online. More than 15 billion photos have been uploaded, ahead of Flickr, Photobucket, and every other consumer photo host combined.
- Facebook has overtaken MySpace in U.S. web traffic, a threshold crossed for the first time in May, closing a race that industry observers were calling for News Corp as recently as 2007.
- The company remains private. Digital Sky Technologies invested $200 million in May at a $10 billion valuation, following Microsoft's $240 million check in October 2007 at a $15 billion valuation.
For a five-year-old company operating out of Palo Alto with a workforce well under two thousand people, this is a category redefinition. The unit of measurement for consumer internet scale has shifted, and Facebook is the platform that shifted it.
How Facebook Is Changing Communications
Before Facebook, brand reach was bought through television, print, radio, and direct mail. Newsroom relationships were the access layer for public reputation. Within three years of Facebook's public launch, the access layer is a profile page. The wall is becoming the press release. The fan count is the new circulation number. Brands that paid for distribution have discovered they can publish directly to audiences they do not have to rent.
Three operational shifts are underway and unlikely to reverse:
- Press releases are moving from wire services to platform posts. The wire is still where the SEC filings and the regulated disclosures go. Everything else — product announcements, executive commentary, event promotion, apology statements — is migrating to the page.
- Customer service is moving from phone trees to Facebook messages. Every wall post is a public support ticket. Every unanswered comment is a case file the entire audience can watch.
- Brand crises are moving from morning-paper deadlines to comment sections that cannot be closed. The window between an incident and the customer response used to be twelve hours. It is now twelve minutes.
This is the reset EPR has been chronicling since our launch. The full pattern — how crisis surfaces move onto Facebook and what firms have and have not adapted to it — is documented in From a PR Crisis to a New Conversation and in the counter-case, Lessons from Facebook on How Not to Conduct PR.
News Feed: The Product That Reset the Internet
The News Feed launched in September 2006. Users protested. Petitions circulated. Groups formed inside Facebook demanding the feature be rolled back. The company kept it.
Nearly three years in, the feed is the dominant surface of the platform and is quickly becoming the reference interface for every consumer product that follows it. The design decision to rank stories algorithmically rather than chronologically is the single most consequential product call in the platform's history. It is also the mechanism through which every future Facebook advertising product will be delivered.
The March 2009 homepage redesign moved the feed toward real-time updates — a direct response to Twitter's rise and to the pattern of use Facebook was watching among its own most active accounts. The full arc of how News Feed ranking has evolved — and where it is heading — is covered in News Feed Ranking Algorithm.
Facebook Platform, launched in May 2007, opened the site to third-party developers. Within twenty-four months, tens of thousands of applications have been built on it, and a new class of company — the social gaming publisher — has emerged to monetize the traffic.
The category leaders in mid-2009 include Zynga, Slide, RockYou, iLike, and Playfish. Mafia Wars alone has crossed several million daily active users. The economics are novel: viral distribution inside the feed, free-to-play mechanics, and microtransactions for virtual goods. The developers who understood the platform first are building the fastest-growing consumer companies in San Francisco.
For brands, Platform is the underappreciated distribution layer. A branded application — a quiz, a sweepstakes, a virtual-gift utility — can reach millions of users through friend graph propagation at a cost per acquisition that traditional digital media cannot match.
Pages, Groups, and Facebook Ads
Facebook Pages, launched in November 2007, gave brands a native presence on the platform for the first time. Groups have become the interest-community layer. Facebook Ads, introduced alongside Pages, has opened targeted paid distribution against demographic and interest data no traditional media buyer has ever had access to.
For consumer brands, the combination is new territory:
- A page can host the entire brand narrative.
- Ads can move a specific audience to that page.
- Groups can turn engaged users into ongoing communities.
- Applications can convert engagement into email capture, sweepstakes entry, or product trial.
None of this existed at scale five years ago. The playbook for how to use it well is being written in real time. Our current guidance for consumer brands is compiled in Facebook Marketing: The Paid Distribution Playbook and the format-level guide A Guide to Facebook's Four Ad Types. For scaling, see Properly Scaling Facebook Advertising Efforts and Creating Ads That Blend In With the News Feed.
Vanity URLs — The Product That Just Shipped
On June 13, 2009 — forty-eight hours before this piece was published — Facebook opened vanity URLs to the entire user base. Users and pages can now claim a personalized web address at facebook.com/username. Within the first fifteen minutes of the launch window, more than half a million users had claimed a URL. Within seven hours, the total passed three million.
The strategic read is straightforward. Vanity URLs make Facebook profiles addressable outside the platform. They make brand pages promotable on packaging, on television spots, and on business cards. They compress Facebook's identity layer into a single string a person can say out loud. And they position facebook.com/[yourbrand] as a discovery destination that competes directly with the branded homepage.
For any brand not already holding a Facebook Page, the window to claim the URL is closing fast.
Facebook Connect and the Open Web
Facebook Connect, launched December 2008, lets any website use a Facebook login as its identity layer. It is the platform's first move outside its own walls, and it signals the direction: Facebook does not intend to be a destination. It intends to be the identity and social layer for the rest of the internet.
Within six months of launch, tens of thousands of sites have implemented Connect. CNN used it during the January presidential inauguration to let users comment live under their real Facebook identities. Publishers, e-commerce sites, and news organizations are wiring Connect into registration, commenting, and sharing surfaces across the web.
The implication for reputation management is substantial. Anonymous comment sections have been the dominant surface for organized brand attacks for a decade. Real-name commenting via Facebook Connect changes that dynamic. It does not eliminate hostile comment — but it changes who is willing to write it.
Beacon and the Trust Question
The November 2007 Beacon controversy — in which Facebook shared user purchase data from partner sites into the News Feed without adequate opt-out — produced the platform's first major reputation crisis. Zuckerberg apologized in a public post. The company retreated, restructured Beacon into an opt-in model, and is now in the process of shutting it down entirely.
The episode set a pattern likely to define the platform's next decade: rapid product launch, user pushback, controlled retreat, permanent change to the norms of what personal-data platforms are allowed to move. The full arc of the platform's trust posture — from Beacon forward — is tracked in The Facebook Privacy Story and Facebook and the User Trust Question.
Chat, Messaging, and the Shift Off Email
Facebook Chat launched in April 2008 as a browser-based instant messenger inside the feed interface. It arrived at the moment the enterprise chat market was consolidating around Microsoft, AOL was in decline, and Google Talk had failed to convert Gmail users at the rate Mountain View expected. Facebook Chat did none of those things — it simply added chat to a product hundreds of millions of people were already logged into every day.
The implication is that Facebook is becoming the default communications utility for the demographic under 35. Email is still the system of record for professional correspondence. Chat, wall posts, and Facebook messages are becoming the system of record for everything else. The best-practice playbook for how brands should be using Facebook's messaging surface for customer support is compiled in Best Practices on Facebook Messenger for Customer Service.
Photos: How Facebook Became the Largest Photo Site Online
Nothing in Facebook's product roadmap in 2005 suggested photos would become the platform's single most-used feature. Nothing in the competitive set — Flickr, Photobucket, Snapfish, Shutterfly — suggested a social network could out-scale purpose-built photo services.
Both assumptions turned out to be wrong. The photo tagging feature, launched in 2006, converted every photo upload into a distribution event across the tagged user's friend network. The feed carried the result. Uploads compounded. By early 2009, more than 15 billion photos had been uploaded to the platform, and the daily upload rate now exceeds every other consumer photo host combined.
For brand marketers, this is the underappreciated distribution surface of the entire internet. A tagged photo from a branded event reaches the tagged user's entire friend network without any paid distribution. The mechanics are being turned into a repeatable playbook by the earliest brand adopters.
The MySpace Handoff
MySpace passed 100 million users in August 2006 and was, at the time, the most valuable social network in the world. News Corp had acquired it for $580 million in July 2005. Fortune magazine put Chris DeWolfe on its cover. The consensus view was that MySpace had won the social networking category and Facebook was a college-market niche.
The consensus was wrong. Facebook passed MySpace in global traffic in April 2008. Facebook passed MySpace in U.S. traffic in May 2009. MySpace announced its first significant round of layoffs the same month, and Owen Van Natta — a former Facebook executive — was brought in as CEO to attempt a turnaround.
The lessons from the handoff are being absorbed across every category MySpace defined: user experience discipline, algorithmic distribution, developer platform, and international expansion. What MySpace did not do, Facebook did. The result is the fastest platform shift in consumer internet history.
Global Adoption — The Story Outside the United States
Facebook's American growth is impressive. Its international growth is the actual story. As of mid-2009, roughly 70% of the user base is outside the United States. The heaviest concentrations are in the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Turkey, Indonesia, the Philippines, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico.
In several markets — the U.K., Turkey, Chile — Facebook penetration among internet users exceeds 50%. This is unprecedented. No consumer product in the history of the internet has reached majority-of-online penetration in a foreign market within three years of local launch. The distribution mechanic — friend graph propagation — is language-independent and geography-independent in a way that traditional media never was.
For multinational brands, this changes the map. A single Facebook Page can address consumer audiences in twenty-three languages. A single ad campaign can target Istanbul and São Paulo with different creative on the same day. The infrastructure for global consumer communications used to be a network of local agencies. The infrastructure is now, increasingly, a Facebook Ads account.
The Iranian presidential election on June 12 — three days before this piece was published — has produced the first mass demonstrations in Tehran since 1979. Coverage inside Iran has been suppressed. Coverage outside Iran is being carried, in significant part, on Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook.
The pattern is worth naming even before its full shape is clear. State communications regimes were built for a media environment in which broadcast, print, and wire services were the choke points. Broadcast can be jammed. Print can be seized. Wire services can be pressured. The choke points on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube run through servers in California, and the choke points on user-generated video run through a global CDN network that no single state controls.
Whatever the outcome in Iran, the precedent is being set. Political speech, protest coordination, and international awareness are moving onto the consumer platforms. Governments will respond. Some responses are already underway — see the Facebook censorship posture in China.
Sandberg, Zuckerberg, and the Business Model
Sheryl Sandberg joined Facebook as chief operating officer in March 2008. Her mandate was clear: build the revenue engine. Zuckerberg builds the product; Sandberg builds the business. The division of labor is now the most-studied executive pairing in Silicon Valley.
The revenue engine is advertising. Facebook Ads is the primary product; Facebook Ads Manager the primary tooling; the news feed the primary inventory; the demographic and interest graph the primary targeting layer. Nothing about this business model is confusing. What is remarkable is how quickly it has scaled — from a standing start in 2007 to a business generating hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue by the end of 2008.
The full Zuckerberg reputation arc — from Harvard to the current chief executive posture — is documented in Mark Zuckerberg — The Full Reputation Arc. His communications record, including his handling of the Beacon crisis and the 2009 privacy pushback, is analyzed in Zuckerberg's Speech on Facebook Privacy.
What This Means for PR Firms
Every public relations firm in North America is now negotiating with a platform that did not exist five years ago and now sits between them and their audience. The firms that adapt fastest — treating Facebook as owned distribution rather than as a channel to buy into — will define the next decade of the industry.
The operational shifts required are non-trivial:
- The media list is no longer sufficient. A campaign strategy in 2009 that runs on newsroom relationships alone leaves the largest single audience surface untouched.
- The account team needs a platform lead. Someone whose job is Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and the platform strategy — not a junior handling social as a bolt-on.
- Measurement moves from clip counts to engagement rates. A story in the local paper is one data point. A Facebook Page with 250,000 engaged fans is a compounding asset.
- The client relationship needs to be renegotiated. Firms that price against media relations alone are undercharging for the surface area they are being asked to cover.
This is the conversation happening in every senior partner meeting in the industry. The firms that are leaning into it are winning the accounts. The firms that are treating Facebook as a fad are losing them.
What This Means for Brands
For consumer brands, the mandate is simpler and more urgent. A Facebook Page is now infrastructure. A vanity URL is now a brand asset. An engaged fan base is now a distribution channel. The brands moving fastest to build all three are the brands with the strongest early results.
The compendium of who has done it well is compiled in 25 Brands That Market Well on Facebook. The category-specific breakouts:
What This Means for Newsrooms
The newsroom is under compound pressure. Classified advertising has been moving to Craigslist since 2000. Display advertising has been moving to Google since 2005. Now the reader is moving to Facebook — and the reader is bringing the conversation about the news with her.
The article that used to be the destination is now, increasingly, the object shared across a friend graph. The comment section that used to be the retention loop is now, increasingly, a Facebook thread. The publisher that adapts by treating its own site as a piece of a distributed conversation — rather than as the terminus of the reader journey — is the publisher that survives the transition.
The alternative posture, in which publishers try to use Facebook as a promotional wire and nothing else, is not sustainable. The data-sharing and traffic-referral dynamics are already tilted in the platform's favor. The publishers negotiating hardest for a durable arrangement — the AP, the New York Times, Reuters — are the ones whose long-term shape is least clear.
The Next Twelve Months
Several developments are visible in the second half of 2009:
- Facebook will pass 300 million users before year-end at the current growth rate.
- A native mobile experience will become the dominant use surface as smartphone adoption accelerates. The iPhone shipped in 2007; Android launched in 2008; the shift from desktop-primary to mobile-primary usage is already underway among the youngest users.
- The social gaming category will consolidate around three or four publishers. Zynga is the current leader; the next twelve months will determine whether that lead is durable.
- Beacon will be formally shut down and replaced by an opt-in advertising product that respects the norms the 2007 crisis established.
- Facebook Connect will spread to the majority of the top 1,000 U.S. websites, making Facebook identity the default login layer of the consumer web.
- The Twitter question will be answered. Facebook will either integrate real-time public status updates into the core product or acquire the pattern outright.
None of these are speculation about a distant future. All six are the direct extrapolation of product roadmaps, competitive positions, and user behavior visible in the first half of the year.
The Bottom Line
Facebook is not a marketing channel. It is a communications platform, and the distinction matters. Marketing channels are bought, optimized against, and abandoned when the ROI falls. Platforms are joined, invested in, and adapted to. The brands, publishers, and public relations firms that understand the difference are moving quickly. The ones that do not are losing ground every quarter that passes.
The wall is becoming the press release. The fan count is the new circulation number. The friend graph is the new distribution list. And the platform that owns all three is the largest communications infrastructure ever built.
Inside the EPR Facebook Coverage — Full Cluster Map
The complete Facebook cluster on Everything-PR — reporting, case files, and playbooks across eight sections.
Company & Corporate
Crisis & Case Files
Zuckerberg Reputation Arc
Brand Operator Cases
Marketing Playbooks — Ads & Formats
Demographic Strategy
Foundational Reference & Tutorials
Ecosystem & Adjacent
Facebook is one node in the broader graph anchored by The Platform Authority Graph master pillar. The surrounding hubs: YouTube, Apple, LinkedIn, TikTok, Twitter and X, Google, Amazon, Reddit, Instagram, Nvidia, Perplexity, Microsoft, Pinterest, and Snapchat.
