How did Facebook get to 2 billion users? The answer is "science" and "empathy"

Yesterday afternoon, Zuckerberg said more than 650 students had signed up to use thefacebook.com , a number that was expected to top 900 this morning. "I'm really excited to see so many people using this product," Zuckerberg said. —Source: An article titled “Hundreds of people sign up to use Facebook” published in the Harvard Crimson on February 9, 2004

In 2004, a Harvard sophomore named Mark Zuckerberg launched a website to help classmates discover and connect with each other. Since its launch, the site has seen a steady growth in users. As the Harvard Crimson reported, the site had 900 registered users in less than a week. After that, the number of website users reached new milestones one after another. In 2008, the number of users exceeded 100 million; in 2010, the number of users exceeded 200 million; and in 2012, the number of users exceeded 1 billion. Today, five years later, Facebook's monthly active users have exceeded 2 billion and are still growing at a very fast rate. It is incredible that Facebook's vice president of growth, Javier Olivan, can still maintain such a high growth rate 13 years after its launch.

(Photo of Javier Olivan himself)

"I thought the fastest user growth would come after we released multilingual versions and had users in different countries using it, but in fact, the actual peak of growth did not occur until a few years later," Olivan said.

Although Olivan did not expect Facebook to achieve such lasting success on a global scale, he himself is one of the main contributors behind this impressive achievement. Ten years ago, Facebook formed a team specifically responsible for user expansion and growth, and Olivan was a founding member of this team and has been working in this team until today. The team initially consisted of eight people, three of whom, like him, have been working there to this day, including Naomi Gleit, vice president of social welfare projects, Danny Ferrante, head of core data science, and Alex Schultz, vice president of growth marketing , analytics and internationalization. Their work is admired and emulated by countless people in the technology industry, and they themselves are very willing to share their experience in user growth and explain to the outside world why other Facebook services (including WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger) can also achieve miraculous growth rates.

This team redefined the way Internet companies achieve rapid growth. “We were one of the first teams to really be data-driven and product-driven in terms of user growth, whereas the traditional view was that growth was primarily a business function,” said Gleit, who joined Facebook in 2005 after graduating from Stanford University and is the company’s second-oldest employee, after Zuckerberg.

While the initial few people on this team, and others who joined later, did extremely valuable work in user growth, they did not limit their mission to just user growth. For example, Facebook was inspired by the work of the growth team to use solar-powered drones to connect more parts of the world to the Internet. If Facebook wants to achieve continued growth in users, it must first ensure that the number of people with access to the Internet continues to grow.

The “Safety Confirmation” feature launched by Facebook is also the result of the work of the growth team. This feature allows users to mark themselves as safe through the safety confirmation function in emergencies such as natural disasters. Facebook's recently launched GoFundMe-me tool for individual charitable donations was also created by the growth team. Facebook is even applying the work of its growth team to curb fake accounts and unhealthy content. When the company decided to spin off the Messenger feature from Facebook into a standalone app, it asked the growth team to help oversee the entire spin-off process.

(In 2010, when the number of monthly active users exceeded 500 million, Facebook drew a growth curve for the past six years)

If there’s one thing these disparate projects have in common, it’s that they all succeeded because the companies combined data science with empathy. Because of this, Facebook knows what users want from it. This is the approach the growth team has taken from the beginning and will continue to use on new projects in the future.

"Sometimes I imagine us as a SWAT team or a ninja team. We're not just responsible for user growth, we're also responsible for solving new problems, and every time a problem arises, we recruit people who are smarter than us in related fields to help us break through to a new level," said Gleit.

Encountering the 70 million user ceiling

In the early days of Facebook, the number of users continued to grow, but the reason for this growth was not that it had turned growth into a science or developed special technology to drive user growth. In 2007, Facebook was still struggling with something as basic as SEO ( search engine optimization ). To this end, Facebook poached Alex Schultz from eBay. "While it wasn't a very difficult job, no one in the entire Facebook company understood online marketing, and I had been working in online marketing my entire career," Schultz recalled.

Soon after Schultz joined, Facebook faced a huge challenge: Facebook's user base seemed to have peaked. Before that, everyone in the company thought, 'We're going to get billions of users in the future, and we're going to have everyone in the world using our product. ', however, the number of users has stagnated at 70 million. So everybody started to panic about whether we could get to 100 million active users.

It was at that time that Zuckerberg asked company executive Chamath Palihapitaya to form a team specifically responsible for expanding and growing the user base. This is a task that requires overall coordinated advancement, involving not only marketing, but also technology, design and some other departments. Palihapitiya left Facebook in 2011 and switched to venture capital . He is now the owner of the Warriors. But the growth engine he built during his time at Facebook continues to churn.

(Photo by Alex Schultz)

When Schultz's growth team was developing a strategy to grow Facebook's user base to 100 million, they discovered that international markets offered a great opportunity for breakthroughs. However, to expand into the international market, you need to make your products support more languages. Facebook did not launch in English, as MySpace did, before rolling out in other widely used languages ​​such as French, Italian, German and Spanish. On the contrary, Facebook launched a volunteer translation function, allowing Facebook users to help translate. The move will make it easier for users who speak obscure languages ​​to use Facebook's services. Facebook ensures that no one is unable to use its products due to language barriers. It turns out that volunteer translators can produce even higher quality translations than paid experts in this regard.

"The translation quality of volunteers is very high, even higher than that of some professional translators, because they know the product very well. If you don't understand Facebook products, some concepts in the product are very difficult to translate, such as tagging someone or leaving a message on a graffiti wall. How would you translate these things?" said Olivan. Facebook users know what these mean, so Facebook's services are well translated into more than 100 languages.

In the early days, Facebook's registration process was like this: click away from the homepage, and then you need to fill in information on 5 consecutive screen pages. Later, the company embedded these interfaces that required filling in information directly on the homepage. This way users won’t miss out and can complete registration faster. Once registered, new users will only feel the value of Facebook if they can find their friends there. So Facebook also put a link on its homepage that directly linked to an address book import tool developed by Black Ross (co-founder of Firefox), who was a member of Facebook's growth team at the time.

All of these measures, if left to their own devices, would have little effect. But when combined together they can produce tremendous power. It is precisely because of these measures that Facebook has once again seen growth. In August 2008, the number of Facebook users exceeded 100 million.

(A corner of the Facebook growth team’s office environment. The balloon decoration in the picture reads “GROWTH”)

By early 2009, many of the straightforward improvements Facebook had made were working, so the growth team began to shift its focus to data. They began tracking new technologies that helped them find, sign up, and activate new users, allowing them to determine their effectiveness at a granular level.

“A lot of it was really obvious stuff like, how many emails did we try to send? Did we send them? Did we send them? Did they get opened? Did they click on the link in the email? Did they click on the link to our website? Did they convert ?” Schultz explains. Working with data scientist Danny Ferrante, the growth team developed a “growth accounting” system that broke down their efforts (new signups, churned users who became inactive) to help them understand the impact of the changes they made.

By working on these efforts, many Facebook employees can learn whether the products they develop resonate with a specific group of people around the world. “There’s this myth in Silicon Valley that data allows you to optimize for metrics or users. But as the head of analytics at Facebook, I believe this myth is fundamentally flawed because the core value of data is that it allows you to empathize.”

Growth strategies for mobile platforms

As growth teams were demonstrating their power, the era of mobile computers was quietly approaching, and this era of change had a profound impact on the work of growth teams. "We found that many of the users of our products were very different from us. We were using high-end Android or iPhone phones connected to 4G networks. But many other users were using very low-end mobile devices with very poor network signals. Our products did not work well on those devices," said Olivan.

(200 million users are using Facebook Lite, a version specifically developed for low-end devices with poor network signals)

In 2011, the growth team facilitated Facebook’s acquisition of Snaptu, an Israeli startup that had developed a simplified version of Facebook that ran on basic feature phones, eliminating the need for a high-end smartphone or a fast network to use Facebook. This simplified version of Facebook eventually evolved into Facebook Lite, which has become a key component of Facebook's growth strategy. In February this year, Zuckerberg said that Facebook Lite already has 200 million users in developing countries such as Vietnam, Nigeria and Bangladesh.

The challenges Facebook faces in successfully expanding into emerging markets are not simply technical. For Facebook, the challenge of getting more new users to use its products is completely different from in the past. Because in the PC era, all the users Facebook gained were PC users. Today, most of Facebook's new users are mobile users, and many of them may have just started using the Internet. This changes everything from design decisions to registration steps to login flows and everything in between. Faced with this problem, the old employees of Facebook have never stopped thinking about it.

(Luke Woods photo)

Luke Woods is Facebook's head of design, having joined the company in 2011. "We have email accounts, we know what an account is. We have a conceptual model of what Wi-Fi is, you can get it in one place and not another. And so on. We found that we really needed to examine and rethink a lot of these basic core assumptions," Woods said.

If you are reading this article, it is very likely that you signed up for Facebook on a PC a long time ago. You may have forgotten the details of the registration experience at that time, and you don’t know what the experience will be like for newly registered users in 2017. However, Facebook has been optimizing the registration process. In terms of expression, the more direct “Create a new Facebook account” replaces the original “Register on Facebook”. A new "Forgot password?" button has also been added for users to use in case they enter the wrong password.

(The leftmost one is the Facebook login screen in 2011. The middle one is the current login screen, which has simpler language and more attractive visuals. The right one is the account switching screen, which is used when multiple people share a phone)

Another assumption about phones that Facebook must unlearn is that they are always private devices. In some of Facebook's fastest-growing markets, it's common for several people to share a phone, just as it's common for multiple people in an American household to share a PC. Therefore, Facebook has launched an account switching function specifically for this group of people. In this way, when multiple people log in to Facebook on the same mobile phone, they no longer need to log in and out manually.

In addition to seeing the transition from the PC era to the mobile era, are there any other major changes that the growth team sees happening? Maybe. Facebook is betting big on virtual reality. But for now, the transition from the PC era to the mobile era is still in progress, not complete. "A lot of people think the mobile era is a thing of the past and start looking forward to what the next revolution will be. That's a bit too far ahead of the times. Many people first came into contact with the internet on their mobile phones," Woods said.

Discover and meet needs: from "registration" to "security confirmation" and other

Facebook's "Safety Confirmation" feature was an accidental result of the growth team's work and was not previously part of Facebook's product planning. In 2011, Facebook sent a team to Japan to study the country's consumer needs. Japanese users all use unique local mobile phone brands, which is a relatively special use case scenario. “A week later, the Fukushima tsunami disaster happened, so we had to evacuate our engineers. We evacuated them to southern Japan and put them in a hotel in Fukuoka,” Olivan said.

(The current "Safety Confirmation" feature not only allows you to mark yourself as safe, but also allows you to provide some information about your surroundings)

The experience of being safely removed from a dangerous situation made Facebook employees realize that Facebook could be a useful tool to alert family and friends in similar dangerous situations. So they developed the "Safety Confirmation" feature.

(Photo by Naomi Gleit)

“Zuckerberg wants us to use these data-driven, product-driven approaches not just to solve growth problems, but to solve other problems as well,” Gleit said. Gleit is Facebook's vice president of social good, and her projects include safety confirmation features, charity fundraising features, and some other serious issues that Facebook needs to take action on.

The influence of Facebook's growth team is also reflected in the fact that the social welfare projects that Gleit is responsible for have data indicator requirements, rather than simply shouting slogans to enhance Facebook's brand image. “At a high level, we want to drive real-world action, because real-world action has real-world impact,” Gleit said. For example, in charity fundraising projects, the indicator they measure is how much money is raised.

The pragmatism and persistence in work, and the determination to never give up until the goal is achieved, have played a vital role in the development of Facebook. "As a team, I don't think our killer feature is how smart we are. Our real killer feature is strong execution," Schultz said.

In Olivan's view, Facebook's growth team has achieved such impressive results because of another killer feature: providing users with truly valuable products. Countless people are very concerned about what services Facebook can provide. There is no growth team in the world that can grow a product without value. Almost every service launched by Facebook has gained widespread support and popularity among users, which is why it has been able to quickly accumulate 2 billion users. Understand user needs and provide valuable products that meet user needs. If you can do this, the next product for 2 billion users may come from your hands.