Growing Demand Blog

Congratulations to our friends over at Facebook for achieving a truly amazing milestone today – reaching their 500 millionth user.  To celebrate the event, they’ve just unveiled “Facebook Stories,” a mini-site within Facebook that’s filled with stories of how the world’s leading social network has changed the lives of its users.

We’re proud that one of our own Facebook communities, the official page for LIVESTRONG.COM, is featured in “Facebook Stories.”   From the very beginning, we too have been focused on changing people’s lives through our products and properties, and working with Facebook has given us one more terrific set of tools to help us meet and exceed our goals.

We’ve had great success ourselves building engaging social experiences through our own web sites like eHow, Cracked.com, and LIVESTRONG.COM, where users gather to express their common interest in topics as diverse as home improvement, comedy, and health and fitness.  On LIVESTRONG.COM specifically, we’ve also created useful apps that help people make healthier lifestyle choices every day – whether their goal is to lose weight, quit smoking, or even manage their diabetes – and provided them with ready access to a support network from the LIVESTRONG community through highly social tools like Groups and Dares.  But because our users’ social experiences happen not just on our own web sites, we intentionally build these experiences in a manner that connects those powerful tools and communities with Facebook, which is often the center of their social world online.

This extra level of connection with Facebook makes the vibrant social experience for our LIVESTRONG.COM users even better for several reasons.  First, it enables our own community of millions of users to share their health and fitness updates with friends and family who may not yet be members of our site.  One example of this is Facebook’s “Like” button, which allows LIVESTRONG.COM users to share our informative articles, videos and recipes with everyone they connect with on Facebook.  But even more importantly, our LIVESTRONG.COM users benefit from the extra encouragement and support they receive from their Facebook friends.  Great LIVESTRONG.COM tools like our Dares program work even better when users share them on Facebook, transforming their personal decision to live a healthier lifestyle into a more powerful public commitment.  Participants in campaigns like Daily Dares, which encourages people to make one healthy change each day, also benefit from this added level of accountability and connectivity.  And success stories thrive on Facebook as well, because motivational tales about achieving healthy goals are that much more powerful when they come from a trusted friend.

Not only does connectivity with Facebook help us offer a new level of engagement for users on our own properties, but it also benefits our partners’ web sites as well.  Publishers and marketers that use our Pluck social media platform to power their own branded online social network communities are able to leverage the same approach to connecting their sites’ social experiences with those that take place on Facebook.  The result is a social web that makes it easier for visitors to bring their identities, relationships and activities along with them as they traverse the web’s community of communities.

We’re excited to see Facebook continue on its path of amazing growth.  While we’re focused on publishing the world’s content, Facebook is making it easier than ever to share that content with the people our users care about and socialize with online.