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WHAT'S NEXT FOR FACEBOOK? Listening to Facebook executives on yesterday's earnings call announcing fourth quarter results, two clear themes emerged: personalization, and global expansion. Let's take the latter first. Facebook executives announced 1.23 billion people in the world already use Facebook at least once a month. In some countries, penetration is above 80%. The only thing stopping Facebook from adding more users is terrible Internet and telecommunications infrastructure in many places. Facebook has poured time and money into improving that picture, both through the Internet.org project and investing in partnerships with mobile carriers. In terms of user experience, personalization will be the theme for 2014, according to Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg: "As we continue to leverage our understanding of people to make marketing more personal, and do it at massive scale, we will dramatically improve the quality of ads and drive more personal discovery."
ZUCK SAYS IT, FACEBOOK IS NOW A 'MOBILE BUSINESS': Facebook yesterday announced its earnings for the fourth quarter of 2013, including $1.25 billion in mobile ad revenue, 53% of the total. It has been obvious for some time that Facebook is becoming a mobile-first company, but it has never been stated quite as baldly as on yesterday's call. As CEO Mark Zuckerberg put it, "Overall, 2013 was an important year for us. If 2012 was the year we turned our core product into a mobile product, then 2013 was the year when we turned our business into a mobile business."
ENGAGEMENT GROWTH: The company has also thrown impressive stats up lately about the level of user activity on the site. Zuckerberg noted that 60% of Facebook's monthly users access the site on a daily basis, and that some engagement metrics continue to trend up. Here's Zuck again: "On the average day in December, we saw more than 6 billion likes. That's up 59% from 3.8 billion likes a year ago." Our own research shows that brands on Facebook have also benefited from more engagement - 180% growth in shares, comments and likes over the course of 2013.
BUT, LIKE, DOES THAT MATTER? A "like" is not as valuable as a comment or share, and it may be of some concern that 82% of user engagement with brands on Facebook consists of likes, rather than comments or shares.
BREAKING: News emerged this morning that Facebook has launched Paper, a curated and image-heavy news reader app. TechCrunch reports that it will launch Feb. 3 on iOS. (TechCrunch)
10th Birthday - Mark your calendars. It's Facebook's 10-year anniversary next week, marking a decade since Zuckerberg started the social network while attending Harvard. Zuckerberg himself will hit a few milestones soon, according to Businessweek. This year marks a decade since his first date with his now-wife Priscilla Chan, who he met in line for the bathroom at a frat party. Zuckerberg himself turns 30 in May. Businessweek has a big profile out today in which the CEO muses about all the upcoming milestones. Among other things, he shared his 2014 New Year's resolution, to write an email or handwritten thank you note every day. (Businessweek)
MINING TWITTER FOR NEWS - In yesterday's edition of SOCIAL INSIDER we mentioned the growing race among social media and mobile apps to become the go-to place to get caught up on the day's news. Facebook's launch of Paper also ups the stakes in this race. Meanwhile, other services are targeting newsrooms and other news-conscious organizations with social media-mining enterprise tools. Yesterday, Dataminr launched Dataminr for News, a tool that uses an algorithm to help newsrooms discover news that's about to surface on Twitter. Dataminr worked with Twitter and CNN to develop the product. (Dataminr)
Google reports earnings this afternoon. It will be interesting to see whether the executive team mentions Google+, as 2013 saw a big push by Google to integrate the social network deeper into the fabric of all its services, including YouTube.
NEW FEATURES AT LINKEDIN - Yesterday, LinkedIn announced improvements to the "How You're Connected" feature on the service, which shows you how many connections separate you from a professional contact you'd like to meet. The new feature makes it much easier for you to see the people, work histories, and experiences that link your connections to that person so that you can quickly find out what your quickest and best route to an introduction might be. The feature is part of LinkedIn's ongoing efforts to make the site stickier for users. (LinkedIn)
FACEBOOK'S OPEN COMPUTE PROJECT EXPANDS - Bloomberg reports that IBM and Microsoft are the two newest companies to join Facebook's Open Compute project, which aims to spur collaboration for the development of more efficient data centers and online data storage. Other members are Seagate, AMD and some 150 others. Facebook has shown a tremendous ability to bring tech industry stakeholders together, both with Open Compute and Internet.org. (Bloomberg)
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