What Small Businesses Need to Know About Facebook’s Q2 2016 Earnings Call
Last Wednesday, July 27, Facebook held their Second Quarter 2016 Earnings Call. Mark Zuckerberg started the call with Facebook’s ten-year plan. “Over the next three years, we’re focused on continuing to build our community and help people share more of what matters to them. The next five years are about building our newer products into full ecosystems, developers and businesses. And over the next ten years, we’re working to build new technologies to help everyone connect in new ways.”
As a marketer in today’s ecosystem, it’s important to stay in-the-know when it comes to updates and announcements related to how you can and should be marketing your business on Facebook. To that end, we’ve put together some highlights from the call, geared towards small business owners and self-promoters.
Facebook continues to grow… for consumers and businesses.
On the call, Zuckerberg reported that, “1.7 billion people now use Facebook every month and 1.1 billion people use it every day.” Your family is on Facebook; your friends are on Facebook; your customers are on Facebook.
And oh! Guess what? It’s now more likely than ever that your competitors are on Facebook too. Sheryl Sandberg reported, “We’re excited to announce that we now have 60 million monthly active business pages on Facebook. We also continue to grow the number of active advertisers on our platform.”
The future of Facebook is video.
Video was a big part of Facebook’s call – not so surprisingly. Over the past six months the social media giant has put a huge emphasis on live video with the launch and push of Facebook Live. In an April interview with BuzzFeed about live video, Mark Zuckerberg said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if you fast-forward five years and most of the content that people see on Facebook and are sharing on a day-to-day basis is video.”
In the Q2 earnings call, Zuckerberg reiterated his stance on the importance of video. “Ten years ago, most of what we shared and consumed online was text. Now it’s photos, and soon most of it will be video. We see a world that is video first with video at the heart of all of our apps and service.”
The future of Facebook is also mobile.
Video is important, but mobile is too. Sheryl Sandberg named “capitalizing on the shift to mobile” as one of the company’s top priorities. “People have shifted to mobile and marketers know they need to catch up. Mobile is no longer a nice to do, it’s a must do, and we’re working closely with marketers to help them make this transition.”
“The best marketers understand that people watch video differently in mobile feeds. The goal is to create what we think of as thumb-stopping creative, videos that grab attention in the first few seconds even without sound.”
Wait a sec… people are turning to Facebook for search?
You’ve likely heard the oft-cited stat that YouTube is the second largest search engine, after Google. Well, people are searching Facebook like crazy too, to find out what people are saying about different topics across user’s posts.
Zuckerberg said, “Now people are doing more than 2 billion searches a day between looking up people, businesses, and other things that they care about.” For context, Google processes over 3.5 billion searches per day.
What do people find when they search for your business on Facebook?
Facebook sees big opportunity in helping businesses.
Sandberg said, “With only a small fraction of our 60 million business page is advertising, we have a lot of opportunity ahead. We also have a lot of hard work to do to help businesses make the shift to mobile and to drive results for our clients.”
“Over 80% of new advertisers in Q2 started with simplified products like boosted posts. Once these businesses begin advertising with us, we make it easy for them to take advantage of even our most sophisticated capabilities.”
Zuckerberg added, “We’re also improving the experience for our community by building our business with more engaging ads. We’ve also emphasized the importance of measurements and value in driving real results for the businesses that use Facebook, and that means helping them create more relevant and engaging ads.”
Are you currently advertising on Facebook? If so, how? If not, what could Facebook do to make the process easier for you? Share your thoughts in the comments or reach out on Facebook or Twitter.