How does Facebook handles BIG Data??

According to the current situation, we can strongly say that it is impossible to see a person without using social media. Because the world is getting drastic exponential growth digitally around every corner of the world. According to a report, from 2017 to 2019 the total number of social media users has been increased from 2.46 to 2.77 billion.

People are using Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and other social/Messaging medium while doing their daily routines. So, this caused the average time spent on social media by an individual has been increased to 2 hours 22 minutes.

This drastic growth of social media is directly impacting the data generation. Yes, Whatever we do in social media including a like, share, retweet, comments and everything has been stored as a record, and which has been generated data.

Some Interesting Statistics Of Social Media

An article from Excellacom in 2016 what happens on the internet at one minute? Let me give some bits from that :

In one minute..

• 700,000 logins on facebook
• Around 530,000 photos are shared on snap chat
• Around 350000 tweets are tweeted on twitter
• 30,000 photos are shared on Instagram
• 21 million messages on WhatsApp

In 2012, Facebook has revealed that it is generating around 500+ terabytes of data every day. In which 2.7 billion were likes and around 300 million photos per day. Another exciting thing is Facebook is scanning around 105 terabytes of data per each half hour.

Facebook has recently launched SIX Data centers around the globe to handle its immutable data efficiently.

Excited ???!!!

For a user, all these information are just statistics, but for a business like a facebook, these are all very big challenges. Because this data is not gonna dry, but sure it will increase rapidly. If they refused to handle all this data, sure their business would die of data overflow.

So what kind of strategy that businesses like Facebook have decided to handle all this data?

To handle all this data, Organizations like Facebook have adopted BIG DATA technology. Here we gonna discuss how Facebook is using big data analytics? Why they are using big data analytics. Let’s discuss more

How Big Data is Used on Facebook?

The main business strategy of Facebook is to understand who their users are, by understanding their user’s behaviors, interests, and their geographic locations, facebook shows customized ads on their user’s timeline. How it is possible?

There are around billion levels of unstructured data has been generated every day, which contains images, text, video, and everything. With the help of Deep Learning Methodology (AI), Facebook brings structure for unstructured data.

A deep learning analysis tool can learn to recognize the images which contain pizza, without actually telling how a pizza would look like?. This can be done by analyzing the context of the large images that contain pizza. By recognizing the similar images the deep learning tool will segregate the images that contain pizza. This is how data Facebook is bringing a structure to the unstructured data.

In Deep Learning There are several use cases are there

Textual Analysis

Facebook uses DeepText to analyze the text data and extract the exact meaning from the contextual analysis. This is semi-unsupervised learning, this tool won’t need a dictionary or and don’t want to explain the meaning of every word. Instead, it focused on how words are used.

Facial Recognition

The Tool used for this is DL Application, that is DeepFace which will learn itself by recognizing people’s faces in photos. That’s why we’re getting the name of the friends while tagging them in a post. This is an advanced image recognition tool because it will recognize a person who is in two different photos is the same or not.

Target Advertisements

Facebook uses deep neural networks to decide how to target audience while advertising ads. This Artificial intelligence can learn itself to find as much as can about the audience, and cluster them to serve them ads in a most insightful way. Because of this serving the highly targeted advertising, Facebook has become the toughest competitor for the ever known search engine Google.

Likewise, Behind the Facebook business model, there are a lot of interesting data handling methodologies are there, and there are a lot of controversial things behind facebook business flow. But, we don’t want to focus on those things.

A report from McKinsey & Co. stated that by 2009, companies with more than 1,000 employees already had more than 200 terabytes of data of their customer’s lives stored. Consider adding that startling amount of stored data to the rapid growth of data provided to social media platforms since then. There are trillions of tweets, billions of Facebook likes, and other social media sites like Snapchat, Instagram, and Pinterest are only adding to this social media data deluge.

Social media accelerates innovation, drives cost savings, and strengthens brands through mass collaboration. Across every industry, companies are using social media platforms to market and hype up their services and products, along with monitoring what the audience is saying about their brand.

The convergence of social media and big data gives birth to a whole new level of technology.

The Facebook Context

Arguably the world’s most popular social media network with more than two billion monthly active users worldwide, Facebook stores enormous amounts of user data, making it a massive data wonderland. It’s estimated that there will be more than 183 million Facebook users in the United States alone by October 2019. Facebook is still under the top 100 public companies in the world, with a market value of approximately $475 billion.

Every day, we feed Facebook’s data beast with mounds of information. Every 60 seconds, 136,000 photos are uploaded, 510,000 comments are posted, and 293,000 status updates are posted. That is a LOT of data.

At first, this information may not seem to mean very much. But with data like this, Facebook knows who our friends are, what we look like, where we are, what we are doing, our likes, our dislikes, and so much more. Some researchers even say Facebook has enough data to know us better than our therapists!

Have you ever seen one of the videos on Facebook that shows a “flashback” of posts, likes, or images — like the ones you might see on your birthday or on the anniversary of becoming friends with someone? If so, you have seen examples of how Facebook uses Big Data.

Apart from Google, Facebook is probably the only company that possesses this high level of detailed customer information. The more users who use Facebook, the more information they amass. Heavily investing in its ability to collect, store, and analyze data, Facebook does not stop there. Apart from analyzing user data, Facebook has other ways of determining user behavior.

Facebook Inc. analytics chief Ken Rudin says, “Big Data is crucial to the company’s very being.” He goes on to say that, “Facebook relies on a massive installation of Hadoop, a highly scalable open-source framework that uses clusters of low-cost servers to solve problems. Facebook even designs its hardware for this purpose. Hadoop is just one of many Big Data technologies employed at Facebook.”

Examples

Here are a few examples that show how Facebook uses its Big Data.

Example 1: The Flashback

Honoring its 10th anniversary, Facebook offered its users the option of viewing and sharing a video that traces the course of their social network activity from the date of registration until the present. Called the “Flashback,” this video is a collection of photos and posts that received the most comments and likes and set to nostalgic background music.

Other videos have been created since then, including those you can view and share in celebrating a “Friendversary,” the anniversary of two people becoming friends on Facebook. You’ll also be able to see a special video on your birthday.

Example 2: I Voted

Facebook successfully tied the political activity to user engagement when they came out with a social experiment by creating a sticker allowing its users to declare “I Voted” on their profiles.

This experiment ran during the 2010 midterm elections and seemed useful. Users who noticed the button were likely to vote and be vocal about the behavior of voting once they saw their friends were participating in it. Out of a total of 61 million users, then, 20% of the users who saw their friends voting, also clicked the sticker.

The Data science unit at Facebook has claimed that with the combination of their stickers that motivated close to 60,000 voters directly, and the social contagion, which prompted 280,000 connected users to vote for a total of 340,000 additional voters in the midterm elections.

For the 2016 elections, Facebook expanded its involvement into the voting process with reminders and directions to users’ polling places.

Example 3: Celebrate Pride

Following the Supreme Court’s judgment on same-sex marriage as a Constitutional right, Facebook turned into a drenched rainbow spectacle called “Celebrate Pride,” a way of showing support for marriage equality. Facebook provided an easy, simple way to transform profile pictures into rainbow-colored ones. Celebrations such as these hadn’t been seen since 2013 when 3 million people updated their profile pictures to the red equals sign (the logo of the Human Rights Campaign).

Within the first few hours of availability, more than a million users had changed their profile pictures, according to the spokesperson for Facebook, William Nevius. All this excitement also raised questions about what kind of research Facebook was conducting after their tracking user moods and citing behavior research. When the company published a paper, The Diffusion of Support in an Online Social Movement, two data scientists at Facebook had analyzed the factors which predicted the support for marriage equality on Facebook. Factors that contributed to a user changing profile pictures to the red sign were looked at.

Example 4: Topic Data

Topic Data is a Facebook technology that displays to marketers the responses of the audience about brands, events, activities, and subjects in a way that keeps their personal information private. Marketers use the information from topic data to selectively change the way they market on the platform as well as other channels.

This data was previously available through third parties but was not as useful because the sample size was too small to be significant, and the determination of demographics was almost impossible. With Topic Data, Facebook has grouped the data and stripped personal information for user activity to help marketers by offering insights on all the possible activities related to a specific topic. This gives marketers an actionable and comprehensive view of their audience for the first time.

THANKS FOR READING!