Similarities Between Facebook & Google

Facebook and Google both play major roles in the daily Internet experiences of millions of people. If you are thinking of how best to market your business or are just trying to gain a clear idea of how Internet business works, understanding Google and Facebook is vital. Facebook and Google have lots of similarities, including their revenue-generation approaches and the ways in which they rely on user data. Both Facebook and Google provide social networking services, but there is a lot more to their business models than just that.

Both Facebook and Google make money from advertising. Facebook ads appear in various locations when you are logged into the social network. Google ads appear in Google search engine results pages and on many other sites. AdWords, Google's advertising service, places advertisers' marketing content within the pages of publishers who have signed up to the AdSense program. Both Facebook and Google use targeted marketing, in which ads appear within relevant pages. These are pages whose readers are judged to be potentially interested in the products being advertised based on data about the reader or about the content of the page itself.

Both the Facebook and Google advertising programs rely on user data. With Facebook, this is done on the data you enter when you sign up for an account, together with any data from information you share through the social network. Google also uses data you enter, particularly if you sign up to use the Google+ social network. Google data also includes searches you carry out, with the key words and phrases you use to search potentially being used to target ads at you. In the business of targeted advertising, user data is a valuable commodity, and is key to the status of both companies.

Facebook is a social network which provides a range of additional services. Google is primarily a search engine provider, but the company also offers a range of other products, including social networking through the Google+ service. In both Facebook and Google+, you create a profile page displaying information about yourself and can make connections with other users on the network. Users can communicate with one another in Facebook and Google+ by sending various types of message.

Google and Facebook both are often involved in the process of accessing Web content. For example, you can end up viewing a Web page having followed many possible routes. The simplest is typing the Web page's address into your browser address bar, but this is relatively uncommon. In most cases, users visit websites by following links from other sites such as Facebook and Google. For Google, this may involve searching for a word or phrase then selecting a site from the resulting list. For both Facebook and Google, it can involve clicking links in posts created by other users, for example when a user you are connected with has clicked a Facebook "like" button or a Google+ "+1" button in a Web page in order to share it.