Social Media Marketing for Business

Facebook turned in another strong quarter with some surprising statistics like a 247% increase in ad prices, hints at Facebook groups spinning out into their own app, and no desire to build their own payments platform.

Keep reading for a quick summary of the Facebook Q3 earnings call. I’ll go over the most important parts of the call including my own analysis on the call and what the future of Facebook marketing looks like for businesses.

Stats Everyone Will be Talking About Tomorrow

• 1.35 billion people log into Facebook each month
• 864 million daily active users up from 829 million in the second quarter of 2014
• 64% of monthly active users log on every day
• 1.12 billion use Facebook mobile each month up 250m since last year
• 703m use Facebook mobile each day (40% growth yoy)
• $3.2b in total revenue
• Advertising revenue grew 64% yoy
• Mobile is 66% of ad revenue up from 49% during the same time last year
• 700m people use Facebook groups every month (keep reading for speculation about a spin out)
• 1b engagement every week between public figures and their Facebook fanpage fans
• 1b video views a day in September
• 30m active Facebook fan pages
• Average Instagram user spends 21 minutes per day on the app
• Users respond 20% faster on FB messenger app versus native FB messenger
• Whatsapp has 600m monthly active users, on track for 1b
• 1.5 million total advertisers on Facebook
• 3b links have been created through Facebook applink
• Price per Facebook ad increased 247% due to higher quality
• Total advertising impressions declined 56% year over year
• Payment volume from games decreased 2% year over year
• Instagram has 200m users, goal to get to 1b in short term
• 8300 employees up 40% since last year
• 766m in free cash flow in the third quarter

What These Updated Stats Mean For You

First, businesses will die if they automate content creation and post generic content not highly relevant to their followers.

As tools help both consumers and businesses create content faster, competition for exposure in the Facebook newsfeed will only increase. Remember, the world cup generated 10b interactions just by itself and public figures averaged 1b interactions per day in September.

The businesses that continue to get high engagement will be the ones that invest in telling personalized stories and creating deep experiences for fans. If you’re looking for creative engagement ideas, click here and click the “show me more ideas” button in the bottom right.

Effective ad prices increased 247%.

This means businesses will need to get more clear on who their ideal customer is if they want to generate a positive ROI using Facebook ads.

A simple but highly effective strategy is to capture the email addresses of your Facebook fans and then retarget them by uploading their emails into Facebook’s advertising platform. Use a Facebook contest platform like ours which is averaging a 17.5% conversion rate from Facebook fan to email address over the last 2,000 campaigns launched.

If you haven’t organically grown your page to at least 500 fans, this strategy will not work. Focus on getting engagement instead using a tool like timeline contest creator and remember that 456m users are only using Facebook on their mobile each day. Make content easy to engage from on a mobile device.

What’s Next?

Facebook will spin groups out into their own app within the next year.

Mark specifically said that the mobile app ecosystem likes apps that are very good at doing one thing really well. He also stated that in Facebook’s effort to connect the world, reaching 1b users per app is a critical milestone to begin monetization.

Facebook will not build its own payments platform.

Speculation around Facebook creating it’s own payments platform post-poaching of Paypal’s CEO is unfounded. Facebook will take a partnership approach to creating a seamless payment experience on the platform versus building something themselves. This is good news for Paypal, Stripe, and other major players in the online payments space.

Facebook will focus on connecting the world, understanding the world, and building the next generation computing platform over the next 3-10 years.

In the short term (3 years) they’ll grow and serve the existing community of 864m daily Facebook users and 700m daily users of Facebook groups as an example.

To date, Facebook users viewed video 1b times per day in September and spent 21 minutes per day on Instagram.

In the mid term (5 years) they’ll focus on making Messenger, Whatsapp, search, and Instagram into their own business behemoths by helping them reach 1b users. Whatsapp is at 600m users and well on the path to reach 1b in mid term.

Over the long term (10 years) Facebook will focus on getting more of the worlds population internet via internet.org and on creating the next great computing platform via Oculus rift.

Mark believes Oculus is well places to shape the long term of computing. Virtual and augmented reality will be part of future of computing over next 10-15 years, he says.

I want your Facebook Q3 Earnings Call opinion. Tell me in the comments: Do you think Facebook will make Facebook groups into a standalone mobile app in the next 6 months?

This article was originally published on LinkedIn. Check it out here.

Meet Nathan

Nathan Latka has supported the growth of over 100,000 small businesses using social media and data driven campaigns — all without a college degree.