Andy Johns, a member of the Facebook growth team organized by Quora, responded directly to the famous [What are some decisions taken by the “Growth”. Team ”at Facebook that helped Facebook reach 500 million users.](Https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-decisions-taken-by-the-Growth-team-at-Facebook-that-helped- There is a thread called Facebook-reach-500-million-users #).

Andy's answer focuses on ** daily decision-making **, and from the four axes of ** tactics, employment, strategy, and culture **, how ** can reach 500 million users in just four years. I summarized it with concrete examples about whether it was extended to people **.

Andy's summary is also very good, but this time I would like to cut this thread from the following three different axes based on the request from my seniors. I feel that the platform to be posted is a little strange, but I'm not afraid to post it because it should be done by an engineer and it will be worth looking at.

What are the necessary elements for KPI formulation?
To speed up the PDCA cycle
Specific actions they performed

Click here for the blog to run: Effort 1mm

Before getting into the main subject,

Before getting into the main subject, I would like to touch on some information about Facebook's growth team as of 2010 and the current number of Facebook users.

At that time, Facebook's growth team had about 30 members of different nationalities. The growth team was fully responsible for optimization, including acquisitions, partnerships and multilingual FB pages. Among them were also included. Unfortunately, I couldn't find information on the current growth team, so I would be very happy if anyone could tell me Facebook or in the comments. is. ..

Facebook, which was born in 2006, has reached 500 million users by 2010. From there to the end of 2015, the number of users tripled to 1.59 billion. By the latest July 2016, it had acquired another 100 million people, exceeding 1.7 billion people. This was done at the request of an LGBT person [Facebook relaxed real name policy](http://jp.techcrunch.com/2015/12/16/20151215facebook-makes-changes-to-its-real-name -policy /) It may also have an effect.

Source: TechCrunch: facebook earnings Q4

Then to the main subject!

Growth team KPI formulation method

Even if you actually optimize some kind of service, you often do not understand the procedure from ** problem setting to KPI formulation **, which is the first step. Some respondents say that "acquisition is the best practice" at the stage of KPI formulation, but here we will summarize the KPI formulation procedure for ** self-help growth strategy without shortcuts **.

About the procedure for formulating KPIs to increase the number of Facebook users

The first step in developing a KPI in this case begins with ** dividing the task into several smaller questions **. Since ** increasing the number of users ** is a major issue this time, KPIs need to be set for at least four levels of users: ** unregistered, registered, in use, and suspended **.

Once the target is clear, the following four can be defined as subdivided questions for KPI formulation.

How to increase the new user acquisition rate
How to make a new user an active user as soon as possible
How to pull the trigger to increase the app usage time
What can be done to bring back the leaked user

This is a diagram of Andy's actual customer journey and challenges for users at each stage, which may be a great way to get an idea.

Source: [Quora: What are some decisions taken by the "Growth team" at Facebook that helped Facebook reach 500 million users?](Https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-decisions-taken-by- the-Growth-team-at-Facebook-that-helped-Facebook-reach-500-million-users)

Most of the time, while looking for solutions to these problems, you'll find specific answers such as "To get new users, you can extend the ability to upload Facebook photos!" Once you find the answer, you need to consider which of the following two methods is more efficient.

--Increase the value of existing user contacts --Create a new user contact from scratch

For example, in the case of photos, we can think of two channels: ** Simplify existing photo upload procedures ** and ** Create import function from Google Photos **.

If you're offering a service that encourages users to register, you might be able to get some tips on optimizing user contacts from the following examples that Facebook's growth team actually found.

--Increase the absolute amount of invitation emails --Prompt existing users to send invitation emails --Increase the CTR of invitation emails --Increase the CTR of invitation emails by existing users --Logout page design --Registration form optimization --Improved account verification email before registration

Formulating KPIs for user acquisition is like a stacked bar graph, and if each channel improves even a little, it will have a huge effect as a whole. As you increase the number of channels, the total number of users will increase steadily.

Of course, simply increasing the number of channels does not mean success. If you increase it, you have to optimize it, and if the channel has a bad reputation, it may be counterproductive.

In order to increase the number of channels and improve the quality of each, it is necessary to repeat the challenge without fear of failure and to run the PDCA cycle at high speed while taking risks. Of course, Facebook's growth team was also making ** ingenuity to speed up the PDCA cycle **.

Efforts to speed up the PDCA cycle

I like Keisuke Honda, and I often read articles about him. His straight attitude or unbreakable spirit is a natural thing that I don't have, and above all, it's cool to say something. Even though I am a soccer player, I also like the fact that I run my own business. Keisuke Honda, who is also reaching out to such a business, said this about achieving his goals.

Frustration turns into a process, and if it succeeds at the end, frustration turns into a process.

So just don't give up until you succeed.

To be successful quickly, you need to take on as many challenges as possible, and risk-taking is essential for that. Everyone wants to avoid taking risks as much as possible, but in order to succeed as a company, it is necessary to take risks, take many challenges, and run PDCA as fast as possible.

Andy cites three points he was practicing on Facebook to make the above happen. It was impressive that there were many organizational aspects that needed to be continued for a long period of time, rather than seeing the results with short-term efforts of small hands.

A sense of distance between management and the growth team
Creating culture
M & A

A sense of distance between management and the growth team

As mentioned in Example of business improvement by data science of memebox, the growth team based on data is close to the management team. There is a need. Andy also mentioned in the photo that the growth team and management had a close relationship. This captures the moment when the growth team leader Chamath and management, including Zuckerberg, are talking intimately.

The characteristics of ** growth ** influence the reason why growth teams need to be close to management. Growth should not be perceived as one department and should be carried out, but should be carried out for all departments from a management-like perspective in order to achieve the corporate mission. As you can see from this photo, Facebook's growth team also seems to have been optimizing for growth from a cross-functional perspective with the generous support of management.

Finally, Andy wants to cite the part of the decision-making that management should make for the growth of a company that is most important. It wasn't the formulation of a grand corporate mission, but a symbolic content that touched on what the growth team should be in the company.

** Growth ** is positioned as the most fundamental element in the daily activities of the engineer, operation and planning team. Perhaps the most important decision management should make is to set a ** growth ** position in the company.

Culture making

The national flag of the member's country of origin is hung on the ceiling of the office of the international growth team.

Alongside these flags, only two flags that do not belong to any country were hung on the ceiling of the growth team's office. What was listed there was a mission that members of the growth team should keep in mind, and it was designed to inspire those who are afraid of risk-taking.

GO BIG OR GO HOME

UP AND TO THE RIGHT

Messages were scattered everywhere else, and the famous ** DONE IS BETTER THAN PERFECT ** was one of the messages on the wall of the office.

I also thought that such efforts to create a culture and organization such as support from management might be useful for running the PDCA cycle at high speed. Next, let's take a slightly different example of PDCA cycle acceleration (or shortcut?).

M&A

If you have some goals and you have plenty of money, acquiring a company may be one way to speed up the PDCA cycle. Andy said that Facebook's growth team actually took the lead in acquiring companies and partnering.

Here is a concrete example of speeding up the cycle by acquiring a company for the expansion of friend recommendation function that Facebook actually carried out.

Acquisition of Octazen

Facebook's mission is to connect people around the world. For that purpose, it was essential to create a ** list of relationships ** like a social graph. And to reach this goal, Facebook chose to buy a Malaysian startup called Octazen, which has that information, rather than creating its own social graph.

Octazen had users recognize the right to retrieve friend information, etc., and based on that information, extracted the user's contact list and social graph to create a list of relationships.

Based on information from the acquired Octazen, Facebook completed a social graph in a few months, which would take years to work on its own. The expanded friend recommendation function has made it possible to continuously increase the number of users.

It may be important to speed up PDCA in order to achieve the purpose. But keeping the cycle running is a laborious and mentally painstaking task. When such a goal appears, ** shortcut of PDCA process by acquisition ** may be effective as one means.

Specific operation

It seems that there were some special operations, including a number of optimizations to acquire 500 million users. However, Andy emphasized that it was very simple, Example of business improvement by data science of memebox But I wrote, ** Keep doing what the textbook says **.

There are a lot of things we have to tell about the work we have done. But most of them aren't special, they're in marketing textbooks. Test it, give it a try in production, and refine it with feedback. You just repeated this.

Before giving a concrete example that Andy actually gave, it should be noted that ** there is no way that doing what is written here in a straightforward manner will work **. User behavior changes not only with the platform but also with the times. It is important to keep in mind that it is important to refer to these and optimize the services so that they are most effective.

Here, examples of the optimization are summarized in a bulleted list. The process by which these concrete examples were derived is also explained carefully, but the content is already abundant, and I would like to summarize the process at another time. The following is a concrete example of optimization.

Use buttons rather than sentences
Watch out for button positions and words
Not only the position but also the size, color and shadow are important!
Speed is justice. Slow sites are as good as not being aware of the CV rate
Enrich headlines and subheadings to create valuable content
Do not overuse letters. A simple and concise site
Coloring is a growth hacker's pleasure
The image increases the CV rate. Let's test how to use it efficiently
If you express your gratitude to users well, the CV rate will also increase.
If used correctly, the product description video is very effective.
User registration Home is simple. Let's configure it so that it can be automatically entered
Make good use of human needs such as belonging (ex. N friends are using the service!)
Complete the AB test of email subject, sender address, date and time
The CV rate was higher for text emails than for html emails!
Make good use of advertising. Further streamlining landing pages can increase the CV rate by a factor of three.
Rotate your ad images and messages every few days for even better results
Simple way to click on Facebook ads
To increase the CTR of Adwords, let's be able to enter keywords dynamically
AB test the position of the SNS share button
Don't forget to optimize SEO metadata
If you have less than 20,000 Adwords campaigns, create one ad group for each keyword. This allows you to place ads for the keywords you're looking for without duplication, and this was the quickest way to increase your Adwords CTR.

Source

What awesome top strategies for conversion optimization

What are some decisions taken by the Growth team at Facebook that helped Facebook reach 500 million users