Facebook’s Mobile Strategy & Stats
// Wednesday, February 17th, 2010 02:54 pm GMT -5 // No Comments » // SEO, Social Media
Facebook’s VP of User Growth, Mobile and International Expansion Chamath Palihapitiya shared the social networking giant’s current mobile strategy and its plans for the future. Read below:
- Facebook believes 2010 will be a watershed year for mobile
- The service is now actively used by more than 400 million people
- 100 million users (25% of total number of users) actively uses Facebook’s mobile products at least once a month
- 200 million people have interacted with Facebook on mobile at least once
- Facebook now works together with some 200 mobile operators – and they are striving to convince more about the added value of such partnerships
- Mobile users demonstrate twice as much engagement than Web users (2x the pageviews, interactions, consumptions and productions)
- They use the above as an argument to convince operators services like Facebook can help drive more sales for more capable phones and heavier data plans
- Facebook is traditionally strong in English-speaking countries, but that’s not all – for example,every single user in Indonesia apparently uses Facebook’s mobile products
* There are 3 key themes to Facebook’s mobile strategy:
- MOBILE WEBSITE: two versions, one for regular phones and one for touch-screen enabled phones – these have now been translated into 70+ languages, covering about 98% of the world population.
- SMS: interactions through Facebook using shortcodes – so far there are deals with 80 operators in 32 countries
- DEVICES: applications or ‘integrated experiences’, which means Facebook intends to hook its service deeper into the core OS handsets run on
* New developments:
- VODAFONE UK TRIAL: the carrier offered Facebook mobile free of charge for a week, which not only caused an expected usage spike, but also resulted in an increase of 20% of people who kept using and paying for heavier data plans after the trial
- FACEBOOK ZERO: stripped down, text-only version of Facebook’s mobile website – carriers can offer this free of charge for as long as they like, and attempt to transition users to a charged model at a later stage more effectively
- Facebook aims to turn FB Connect into a ‘foundational element’ of the web, whether accessed on mobile phones or not.
- In the future, Facebook Connect should become more of a core integration both on an OEM, app and OS level (naming iPhone, RIM, Windows Mobile and Android as examples)
- Facebook intends to play a more important role in the app developers ecosystem
- The company stressed that their goal is to keep pushing the envelope for users, operators, device manufacturers and developers.
