Global Social Networking and Media Industry Global Overview

Executive Summary The purpose of this research is to analyze the global social networking and media industry and determine how and why individual competitors make money. We will take a further look into several topics including what defines the industry, the industry lifecycle, economic indicators, and examine several of the industry leaders including Facebook, Google+, YouTube and Twitter. By detailing how these social networking sites made it to the top of their industry and continue to maintain a competitive advantage we will identify their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Being a fairly new industry, we believe that this is a global industry that will continue to grow and be one of the quickest growing among all industries. It is reported that there are 2.5 billion Internet users globally, of these 2.5 billion, there is an estimated 1.9 billion using social networking sites. Although these social networking sites are very similar by definition, they all harvest their own differentiations, separating themselves from their competitors and maintaining their competitive edge.

Industry Overview

The use of social networking sites has seen huge growth since the early 2000’s, doubling in size since 2007, most notably with the creation of Facebook. The importance of social networking sites online has continued to grow and Facebook now even poses a serious threat to Google in terms of traffic. Social media is a way to transmit, or share information with a broad audience, in which everyone has the opportunity to create and distribute. Social networking is an act of engagement, where groups of people with common interests, or like minds, associate together on social networking sites and build relationships through community. Social media is more akin to a communication channel, as