Facebook One Year Later. How Did Going Public Work Out?

It has been just about a year since our friends over at Facebook took their company public. We all remember the big hoopla about it all, right? The company was worth a reported $1B and those holding stocks in the soon to be public company were going to get a great return on their investment.

Well, Facebook certainly hasn’t soared to new heights as far as its value but how has the last year treated the mega social media site? We were curious so we did a little digging.  Luckily CNN Money just came out with a great article this week with some insightful information.

Overall things are falling for Facebook. In May so far shares of Facebook have fallen 12% and Facebook stock is down 10% year-to-date. This is gloomy considering that other companies are doing better this year and this month in particular – Yahoo, Google, etc.

So, what does this mean? Well, the author of the CNN Money article summed it up by saying that people are still realizing that Facebook was probably overvalued when it went public. The slide for Facebook is probably just the market’s way of getting Facebook down to the level where it should be.

We have talked before on our blog about the idea of using social media sites for advertising. We have stated that, as marketers, that we aren’t convinced that is where businesses should put their advertising dollars to use. (We are huge believers in using Google instead.) We think that social media sites have their function – to let people interact with friends and family. Social media sites are just not the place people go to shop. (As of today anyway.) It does seem like it is going to continue to be hard to make money with social media sites.

Here is a link to the article we read for more information: http://buzz.money.cnn.com/2013/05/28/facebook-stock-slump/