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Moby Says...
Moby Says...Gary (FanBoom's social media correspondent) and I were fighting over this post. So I ate him. Don't worry, Gary has 10,000 brothers with the same name, all of whom look like him and are eager to take his place - you won't even notice the difference. Anyway, on with the serious business. If you were worried about Facebook's performance since it went 'public', let me allay your fears. They're doing alright. And a big part of that is their success on mobile, contrary to the prediction of various analysts. Mobile ads are effective, and the sector will continue to grow for years to come. Check out this short piece, which sums up the situation nicely...
61 per cent rise in advertising for Q2 2013
Social networking giant, Facebook.com, has confonded its critics (probably us included) by announcing far better than expected revenues for Q2 2013 from advertising. They rose by an impressive 61 per cent to reach $1.6 billion. Analysts say that one key to its success in attracting mobile ad revenues has been to allow ads to be placed in its news feed. This is particularly crucial for mobile because there is no right hand column displayed on the mobile version of the Facebook site.
It’s not all good news for Facebook, though. Remember the HTC First which came pre-loaded with Facebook’s ‘super app’. Well, it bombed.
Only one month after the custom Android handset was released in the USA, the price was dropped from $99 on a two year contract to a mere 99 cents.
GoMo News always questioned the wisdom of only releasing the super app in the USA in the first place. Just bound to antagonise users.
With around one billion users – the majority of whom now use mobile, spending more and more time on Facebook, the site has now been described as the ‘bedrock’ of advertising.
What has very definitely helped Facebook is the fact that the site is now able to convince advertisers that its users genuinely are viewing their ads.
Sheryl Sandberg, COO with Facebook is quoted as saying,”These marketers are typically very measurement focussed.”
She added, “We believe our ad products are delivering an impressive ROI [Return On Investment].”
However, it seem that marketers have not got it all their own way quite yet.
The next battleground will be video advertising and in Facebook’s case this means the Instagram service which it acquired.
Unfortunately for marketers, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has dropped strong hints that advertising within Instagram won’t be a feature for some time yet.
So they’ll have to wait a while. Just like they did before Facebook finally introduced mobile advertising.
