Tuesday, 17 September 2013

Facebook: Progress Report


What are the big changes Facebook wants to make in the world over the next five or 10 years?

Facebook made some really good progress this Q2 with the growth and engagement of their community, the release of new products like Instagram Video and advertising growth especially on mobile.

Facebook now has more daily actives on mobiles and on desktops, nearly half a billion people use Facebook on their phones every day and soon Facebook will have more revenue on mobiles and on desktop as well.

Now that Facebook has connected a billion people, what are the next big ambitions?

There are three main goals Facebook would like to achieve: connect everyone, understand the world and help build the knowledge economy. Connecting everyone is about growing their community to reach the next five billion people.

Facebook’s mission is to give all people the power to share and make the world more open and connected and that means everyone, not just people in developed countries. Most people in the world don't yet have smartphones or data access but Facebook knows they want to be connected. So Facebook is focused on making this possible, while also strengthening engagement within their existing community.

Understanding the world is that helping people share not just day-to-day updates like text messages and photos but also building up long-term knowledge about the world about what people are interested in; which restaurants are good, which hotels your friends have stayed at and so on. Facebook should be able to build intelligent services that help user network to answer lots of questions for people that no other service can.

And Facebook wants to lead the community to create a graph of all that understanding to power this intelligence. Building the knowledge economy is about helping people create companies and jobs using information.

 

The way Mark Zuckerberg sees advertising products, Facebook isn’t just building a strong monetization engine for itself, but also creating tools to enable new growth, jobs and businesses, door platform and to support a larger economic shift in the world based on knowledge and information.

‘I am proud of the work we are doing here to help developers to create apps to help local businesses find customers, to help great brands tell their stories and this is a core part of our mission’ says Mark.

Now let's talk about the progress Facebook has made in each of these areas, starting with connecting everyone.

The Facebook community has grown steadily this quarter adding 45 million new monthly actives and the number of monthly actives is steadier, increasing across demographics in the countries. Now 61% of monthly actives are daily actives and now the ratio has just continued to increase.

In Facebook’s most penetrated markets like the U.S. more than 70% of monthly actives use their services daily and now more than 700 million people worldwide use daily as of today.

     
As more social services get created, one question is How that Affects the Sharing and Time that People Spend on Facebook?

You could naively assume that more new services mean people spend less time on Facebook but that isn't happening, in fact people on average are spending more time on Facebook than ever before. It's possible that because the market is expanding due to mobile even the time spent per person increases on Facebook maybe their market share could decrease, but that doesn't seem to be happening either.

According to third-party metrics by comScore and Nielsen, Facebook’s share of time spent in the U.S. is either steady or increasing and we believe it's either steady or increasing everywhere else as well.

Some product like video fit into the flow of what people are doing and they take off quickly. Others like graph searching home are completely new kinds of product and they are just going to take a longer to develop. I think it's the right strategy to have a balance of long-term foundational new products ones that fit immediate demand. Facebook is committed to building all of those in to market leading products.





Instagram:

Instagram is growing quickly as well, so if you combine the two services together we believe the engagement and share time spent are likely growing quickly throughout the world.

The newest product that Facebook is most excited about from their last quarter is Instagram Video, adding video fits really naturally with the Instagram mission of capturing and sharing the world's moments. It's off to a great start. People are already uploading hours of video to Instagram every minute.

Instagram has always been about helping people capture moments in the way they're proud of, filters were necessary for photos and when Instagram started most phone cameras weren't good enough to take high quality photos. Separately Instagram continues to grow rapidly with impressive engagement and Facebook announced last month, they had over 130 million actives using the service.


4 comments:

  1. What about Internet.org? (No Mentions)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's under "connect everyone, ... Connecting everyone is about growing their community to reach the next five billion people."

      Delete
  2. The future for Facebook is to get away from ads and enable transactions for users. Integration with online retailing, online travel reservations, dating, cable TV, online event ticketing, online banking or e-payments. Reduce dependence on ads, and add value for users while making money from user activities. Users could post about something they bought, and their Friends could view it and maybe buy one too. Create a movie Event and your Friends can click on it to buy tickets and meet you there. Click on a TV show Event, and easily chat with any of your Friends who are viewing the same show at the same time as you. http://www.billdietrich.me/Facebook.html

    ReplyDelete
  3. I think the future of facebook would be to allow blocking of page content from ridiculous hateful political pages people like and share all the time

    ReplyDelete

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