Nick Hynes, CEO of Somo, talks to Econsultancy on Facebook IPO – and mobile, the key to Facebook’s future success
2/2/2012News broke last night of the long-awaited Facebook IPO announcement, and as the biggest in tech history, it was only right to find out what our CEO and veteran of the digital industries, Nick Hynes, thought of the news.
His comments can be found in today’s Econsultancy piece here. Given Facebook’s ‘gorilla status’, Nick’s opinion was that the valuation was realistic, the investment would be worth it, but the claims that this signified the start of a new tech bubble were unjustified.
Facebook knows its has to monetise mobile, as Stuart Dredge’s piece in the Guardian details, not least because it is the only point of entry for many new users in the developing world. But they also have to be careful not to piss everyone off by upsetting the balance between social and commercial space.
Google could yet scoop up, should mobile ads become a deal breaker for Facebook legions of fans. There was news of a 1oo million user milestone for Google+ today, but still nothing compared to the billion Facebook should get within six months.
Lara O’Reilly from Marketing Week asks four questions of Facebook, and mobile advertising again is first on the list.
Facebook’s desktop Facebook CPM prices have been rising rapidly, advertisers are definitely using desktop and it now accounts for more than a quarter of all US ad impressions. There is a huge amount of untapped usage on mobile Facebook waiting to be snapped up. In the UK alone, 40% of mobile internet usage is via the social network. Mobile and particularly Facebook apps are where consumers are spending increasing amounts of time as smartphone penetration only increases.
They won’t want to port their desktop advertising format to their mobile interface as this would negatively impact upon the mobile experience for users as they have neither the space or the usability. Facebook already has Microsoft’s Bing integrated for online search, and with advertising accounting for 89% of its revenues, this should make mobile search an easy move. Sponsored Stories are an accepted advertising addition to social and this is could be a great opportunity to use Facebook’s data to enhance targeting, possibly even geo-location advertising.
Getting mobile right will be key to Facebook’s future success.
