More than 1.7 billion people use Facebook each month, with more than 1.1 billion accessing the social media platform each day.
The social media giant has reported on its performance for the second quarter of 2016. The total revenue grew by 59% YOY to $6.4 billion. The advertising revenue was up by 63% to $6.2 billion. The organisation recognised US and Canada, and Asia-Pacific as its fastest growing regions with advertising growth rates of 69% and 67% respectively. Overall, ad revenue on mobile reached $5.2 billion, up 81% YOY.
Facebook outlined its business agenda for the next three, five and 10 years in a blog post. See the plans below:
Over the next three years we are focused on continuing to build our community and help people share more of what matters to them:
- Made improvements to core apps to make them work regardless of the device or connection speed; Built a light-weight version of our Android app, called Facebook Lite, used by more than 100 million people.
- Live video: Candace Payne’s Chewbacca mask video was viewed almost 160 million times, news organizations and delegates go Live from the Republican and Democratic convention, and in Minnesota and Dallas Live shined a light on important moments.
- NEW: Launched 360 photos, with more than 4 million 360 photos shared on Facebook, with 1 million more being shared every week.
- NEW: People are searching across more than 2.5 trillion posts conducting more than 2 billion searches a day.
The next five years are about building our products into full ecosystems with developers and businesses:
- Instagram now has more than 500 million monthly actives, with more than 300 million daily. We moved to a ranked feed and are seeing a positive impact in terms of time spent and the amount of content people are sharing.
- More than 1 billion people are using Messenger every month. WhatsApp has a community of more than 1 billion people. This quarter we launched new desktop apps and end-to-end encryption, and millions of people are using WhatsApp’s voice calling features.
Over the next ten years we are working to build new technologies to help everyone connect in new ways:
- First successful flight of Aquila, our solar-powered aircraft that will beam internet to places that have never been connected.
- Announced DeepText, a deep learning-based engine that can understand the context of several thousand posts per second across 20 languages
- More than 1 million people a month are using Oculus on mobile phones through our Gear VR partnership with Samsung; more than 300 apps available at the Oculus store for Gear VR
We’ve continued to make progress on our three priorities in ads:
1.) Capitalising on the shift to mobile:
- The goal is to create what we call “thumb-stopping creative” — videos that grab attention in the first few seconds:
- NEW: For Sour Patch Kids Gum, Mondelez targeted teens with non-chocolate candy interests. Working with VaynerMedia, Carat, and the Facebook Creative Shop, they created punchy 10-second looping videos tailored for Facebook and Instagram. The campaign helped the Sour Patch Kids portfolio beat sales benchmarks for the entire candy industry.
- Expanded Audience Network to include video for brand objectives: advertisers can use brand video ads not just on Facebook and Instagram but across a network of apps and sites
2.) Growing the number of marketers using our ad products:
- NEW: Facebook Pages are the mobile solution for many of the over 60 million businesses using the product each month around the world.
- NEW: Over 85% of active business Pages use mobile and 40% of active advertisers have created a Facebook ad on mobile. In Q2 we rolled out new tools to make it easier for businesses to promote posts and track performance directly from the Instagram app.
- NEW: Over 80% of new advertisers in Q2 started with simplified products, like boosted posts.
- NEW: Lighting Etc., a third-generation family-owned business, used Facebook and Instagram ads to drive in-store sales. They targeted 25-45-year-old homeowners interested in interior design, living within 35 miles of their showroom in Fort Worth, Texas. It was striking to them that the size of the community on Facebook meant they could reach over 300,000 people even with such specific targeting. They’ve seen a 40% increase in revenue in 2016 and they attribute this increase to their ads on Facebook and Instagram.
3.) Making our ads more relevant and effective:
- Businesses are seeing strong results from immersive formats like Video and Canvas Ads.
- Introduced Lead Ads in Q1 to make it easy for people to fill out forms on mobile devices right from News Feed. In Q2 we made it possible for advertisers to retarget people who opened or completed a Lead Ad form
- NEW: Nissan Turkey and the SEM Agency used Lead Ads to collect over 20,000 high-qualityleads from people interested in buying a new car. They then used retargeting to show relevant ads to people who had completed these Lead Ads and ultimately drove vehicle sales. Facebook Lead Ads had a 9.3x lower form submission cost compared to all other online media.
- NEW: Dynamic Ads allow advertisers to upload their product catalogue and target people with specific products in real-time. Over 300 million people see Dynamic Ads each month and over 2.5 billion unique products have been uploaded by marketers. In Q2 we expanded Dynamic Ads to Instagram and also launched Dynamic Ads for Travel. For example, you can now advertise hotel rooms available for specific destinations and dates.