Triadic Closure Property- Key to Facebook Success
Nowadays, Facebook is one of the Internet’s heavyweights. But its creators probably did not foresee this accomplishment when it began to develop at its university dormitory from zero. Millions of people use Facebook every day, yet its creators could never dream about its size.
Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook in 2004. He established a social media website to link Harvard students. As it was launched on 4 February, 1,200-1,500 students registered on the portal during their first 24hrs. From that point, Facebook has grown worldwide and is no longer simply an enormously rich corporation but also a leading institute at the beginning of the new millennium.
In September 2006, Facebook was broadening its service area & welcoming individuals who have a verified email ID aged 13 in any nation. In 2007, it began to earn money from airing advertisements for the first time. Facebook was announced in 2012 at $104 billion in value. It achieves the level of 1 billion users worldwide the same year.
In 2006, after launching Facebook in the global market, the biggest rivalry of two companies for acquiring the social media market had begun, which eventually ended with Facebook being the undisputed king of the social media market.
Social Media Market in the 2000s
As Facebook launched in 2006, it faces MySpace, the biggest & most popular social media of the then world. In 2006, MySpace was growing with the highest capacity. Moreover, it touched 1 million users just in 1 year after launching.
MySpace started in 2004 and received $580 million from News Corporation a year after. MySpace was the largest global network site between 2005 and 2008. As the most frequented site in the USA, it exceeded Google in June 2006. The website was worth 12 billion Dollars at its pinnacle but was sold for only 35 million Dollars in 2011.
MySpace was also enormous for the music industry and served as a self-serving medium for advertisers. By 2006, the website had been the most viewed on the planet. Users were encouraged to contribute new songs instantly on their pages. MySpace, in the month of June 2004, broke one million single visitors.
The rivalries between MySpace and Facebook were predicted to not finish until a decade later by several economists. But unexpectedly, Facebook exceeded MySpace in terms of audience within three years of establishment, in June 2008, as on the verge of blooming as a present social media giant. At the end of 2012, which can also be marked as the year of internet availability for common people, MySpace had only 150 million users; whereas Facebook ended the year 2012 with 1 billion users worldwide.
Now, in 2021, Facebook becomes the most viewed social media site in world & MySpace is out of the world. Moreover, Facebook becomes the most successful unicorn example in the world.
This all happened because of one famous psychological behavior of people known as triadic closure property, which plays a key role in the blooming of Facebook.
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Triadic Closure Property
In its 1908 edition of “Sociology: Investigations on the Forms of Sociation,” triadic closure property is a notion in social network theory initially presented by German sociologist Georg Simmel. Triadic closure property may be used to analyze and forecast network expansion, even though it is just one of several methods that build up human friendships in complicated networks. Mark Granovetter has made the triadic closure property popular by integrating the idea of cognitive balancing with Simmelian social media network comprehension.
In general, cognitive balance refers to two people’s predisposition to feel the same with an item. If the triangle of three persons is not closed. In that case, the person connected to the two will wish to close the triad so that the relationship network may be shut down.
The triadic closure property says that if two people in a social network have a friend in common, then there is an increased likelihood that they will become friends themselves at some point in the future.
Simplification of the triadic closure property can be described as that if A person named A has ties to two persons named B and C, there must also be a connective edge between the two persons named B and C.
The construction of a linking connection between B and C generates, as indicated in the figure, the scenario where all three persons A, B, and C have one another’s edges; the sizes of such a design are known as a triangular formation in networking. The word “triadic closure” is derived from the notion that both B & C “closes” the third element of this triangle.
Causes & Effects of Triadic Closure Property
Three major reasons cause the development of triadic closure property. The reasons are,
- B and C connect because they both spend lots of time with A.
- A might provide opportunities & friendships for B and C.
- B and C are justified in trusting one another since both trust A and tend to trust A’s acquaintances.
This idea remains true to networks that are heavily interlinked and have extremely high grouping ratios. Nevertheless, networks that do not comply with this concept are weakly linked and unstable if negative interactions are incorporated.
Triadic closure property is a suitable paradigm for developing connections over the period. Implementing the triadic notion of closure can anticipate the formation of links inside a system and demonstrate the growth of connectedness at some point. In contrast, basic graph theories prefer to study networks.
Triadic closure property enhances collaborative conduct in social networking sites. However, when new alliances are formed via references from approach combining, the global average group of collaborators is fewer than when people randomly pick new relationships from the general public.
- This physical and cognitive development are two possible explanations.
- The structural building stems from the inclination to heavy clustering.
The informative structure is based on the premise that a person knows something about a friend rather than a random stranger.
Working Principle of Triadic Closure Property in Corporate World
If we implement triadic closure property into a business world, let’s suppose that C is a firm or product A loves & B is familiar with A. To fulfill the three causes of triadic closure property,
- B can learn C to meet the three reasons of triadic closure; for instance, B is with A, while A utilizes Product C. So, B receives C exposure.
- C may have a contract to encourage the introduction of C to A. For example, if A gets friends to sign up, DropBox offers customers additional storage.
- B is more likely than paid advertisements to trust close friend A.
The third cause is arguably business networking’s most effective component. The Forbes article cites a study by Nielsen that showed that “%92 of consumers believe recommendations from friends and family over all forms of advertising.” A study by Professor Shawndra Hill at Wharton further proved this point that people who interacted with previous customers of service were about 3.4 times more likely to purchase the product than people who had not interacted with previous customers.
Related: The Power of Social Proof in Digital Marketing & How to Use It?
Overview of Facebook’s Policy
Facebook has become so unbelievably successful and completes the relationships of its social networking sites significantly. Facebook aims to create an interconnecting network that is user-oriented. Upon logging onto Facebook, a user is urged to establish a network.
Facebook enables users to start without friends from Facebook and allows individuals to post photographs, reviews, thoughts, and feelings of their community. There are easily identifiable options for discovering people and finding friends even though Facebook users have pals, which incentivizes people to grow their connections.
At present, Facebook is attempting to develop new ways of connecting with friends, particularly among the acquaintance’s pals. The aim is also to assist the individual in reconnecting with friends with whom they have not spent some time hoping to build connections. It alone covers strong and weak relationships.
This concentration on networking has allowed Facebook to expand to more than 2.3 billion active users.
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Triadic Closure Property & Facebook
Triadic closure property says that given three-person, A, B, and C, if there is a strong tie between A and B and A and C, there must be a weak or strong tie between B and C.
For Facebook users, A’s buddy C will quickly notice a suggestion for you if you are friends with A’s user on Facebook. You two may even become Facebook friends before becoming actual friends. In any scenario, your distant buddy D gets invited to add C to his network when C and you become friends. The Facebook network confirms on a big scale the power of triadic networking.
Facebook takes issues to itself and thus builds a stronger network. This will accelerate the process. This is a good concept to assist people in regularly broadening existing social networks since they have access to their networks whenever they connect to a new buddy.
Connected users possess links that also communicate as predicted with a triadic closure property. Similarly, when Facebook recently purchased WhatsApp and Instagram, interaction with people using these interconnected apps through Facebook is smoother than previously. While Twitter and Reddit are extremely popular, they still lack a large Facebook-style connection and cannot profit from Facebook’s triadic closure property.
End Note
Did you know that one of the secrets to Facebook’s success is its ability to create triadic closure?
In this article we explained why understanding how your customers think can keep them engaged.
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