Organizational Structure Essay

Facebook is a social-networking site that has a strong organization structure that is appropriate for their particular product; social media. Facebook seems like a simple site that does not require a structure to operate. Facebook launched in 2004 and is currently the most popular social-networking site. People can share photos, stories, life experiences of both positive and negative. This strong organization structure has allowed Facebook to grow and continue to be strong in a competitive marketplace where the product is one’s personal life. Twitter works in the same way but is only set up for chatting through posts, also known as tweets. Tweets are text-based quotes of up to 140 characters and the user’s posts it on their profile page (Shetty, 2010). Users can also send pictures and videos through Twitpics and other sources. Millions of people use Facebook and organizations use them to advertise and to promote their services. Facebook is set up where users have friends who can see each other user’s posts. They also can tag pictures, providing information on who is in a particular picture. Twitter and Facebook have developed their organizational structure to become one of the most used social-networking sites in the world today. This spot was previously held by MySpace. MySpace is used mainly by individuals to chat with each other and post pictures and other personal information. Businesses never adapted to MySpace compared to other social networks such as with Twitter and Facebook. For this reason advertising companies have found it more worthwhile to advertise through Twitter and Facebook. First Facebook, and then Twitter determined that to stay in business and be profitable it would require high traffic on the sites and many top advertisers. Once businesses could take advantage of this new web tool, they quickly learned how helpful it was. Users can friend or follow organizations that they have a special interest in. The organizations can use this platform to promote a product, service, or even cause. Twitter is slightly different from Facebook in the way that the main purpose of the site is to tweet and follow others tweets. It is simple, easy to use, and effective. Twitter has a different business appeal because, unlike Facebook there are no games or other things to do while logged in. Facebook has developed that area of their business and has different games and applications to entertain a person while online. While logged into Facebook a user can also do everything from change their status, check on a friend’s status, or post pictures. Facebook also provides the option of chatting with friends and these chats are stored in your messages. Social networking provides a public outlet as well as a personal outlet. Facebook and Twitter both are popular social networking sites and have developed a business structure that supports their organization. Twitter and Facebook have many organizational functions that support the different responsibilities within the organizations. While Facebook is set up for enormous amounts of marketing through the use of advertising, Twitter allows individual organizations to posts tweets to keep followers interested. Through the use of games Facebook also makes money by asking users to pay for different parts of the games. Anyone who has played Farmville will attest that these games can be addicting. Facebook has many different ways to make money and maintain financial stability, such as the ability to constantly test different things. Twitter also makes its money through advertising, just not in the same way Facebook does. Twitter promotes products using promoted tweets. Organizations pay Twitter to promote their products in searchable tweets. Tweets are searchable even through sites like Google and Bing. While it is less obvious on Twitter, they like Facebook make most of their money promoting other businesses. The more human traffic on a site, the more desirable it is for other organizations to advertise with this site. Both Facebook and Twitter have very high daily traffic organizations gladly pay to advertise with them. Both Facebook and Twitter use a horizontal structure and functional organization. They are set up in a way that each employee on the organization chart has a particular set of skills and responsibilities. These skills and responsibilities are unique to a particular task; they are specialized. A functional organization has specialized departments and are group people according to business functions or particular skills each function require (Bateman & Snell, 2011). Facebook and Twitter are strong organizations and will continue to remain that way. Well-known companies and organizations throughout the world will continue to use them to promote ideas, products, or anything else they want to make known. The employees at Facebook and Twitter have individualized departments with individualized tasks. There is an easy to follow flow chart between each operation. This allows for less confusion and clear channels of authority. Without this failure is inevitable. While one department is responsible for monitoring the information technology, another department is responsible for web content. The same is true for marketing, human recourses, and every other area of business. Each department is specialized and functions efficiently this way. Without proper structure instructions can get confused and responsibilities get uncertain. This creates chaos and in the end will cause the websites to fail. For a business to be successful it must have an effective organizational structure. A basic organization structure gives a business direction and allows it to function. One of the first steps to starting a business is to create a basic organizational structure and have it clearly show departments, their functions, and who will run them (Shetty, 2010). A functional organization is the proper structure for both Facebook and Twitter because of the type of business they are. If responsibilities and departments were not clearly defined or organized differently it may cause them to be less functional and less effective at social-networking. Social-networking sites are here to stay and both Facebook and Twitter are in the lead. They have learned from their predecessor, MySpace what it takes to create high human traffic and attract advertisers. By creating an effective organizational structure, they are successful and have few internal issues. References Bateman, T. S., & Snell, S. A. (2011). Management: Leading & collaborating in a competitive world (9th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Irwin. Shetty, N. (2010). ManagementParadise.com. Retrieved from http://www.managementparadise.com/forums/human-resources-management-h-r/21515