Different news outlets have been discussing if Facebook is weak in mobile, and that it needs to do more to address this issue. 

The question here is, if Facebook is actually really weak in mobile.

As we have analyzed on Socialbakers, Facebook has 488m mobile users. Most of the traffic actually on smartphones, where you can also build interesting mini-applications, games, and other things.

If we would identify three key issues that Facebook mobile has, there would be three categories and angles to looking at the state of Facebook mobile: 

1) Features and innovations

Facebook has created a mobile platform and a mobile Connect platform. Thats probably the best thing it ever did, allowing companies like Instagram to actually grow, having to then buy them for 1bn in equity and cash.

That allows other companies to create innovation on Facebook’s behalf, and then Facebook potentially snagging the talent or buy (Gowalla, …).

Until today, there was also no way of discovering apps other than from the newsfeed. With the new Facebook app store, that gets solved, and a lot can be addressed with that. 

2) Experience

Facebook has had some rough moments with its mobile experience. It started off quite low-end and it built up from there.

The current iPhone version of Facebook is nice, but the experience is horribly slow and needs a lot of work. It doesn’t help, that the experience is a little different on every platform.

For example, you still can’t properly upload an album from a Facebook iPhone app. Not very convenient.

Obviously the limitations of HTML5 don’t allow Facebook to create a proper HTML5 version with say photo uploads, and Facebook has urged companies and W3C to fix this, and I think thats a great, but getting it there might be harder and take time. 

3) Monetization

The question is: Is Facebook really weak in mobile? Well, for one thing its surely weak in mobile monetization. I am sure that for every person using Facebook on their mobile phones, Facebook is actually probably losing more money than its gaining.  

If I would actually sum where the largest Facebook problem is, it would not only be the Experience, but more importantly in monetization.

Facebook doesn’t really have a way to monetize mobile, and the new Appstore doesnt fix that entirely.

Still, it will have to monetize its 488 million active users on mobile. They have the new newsfeed ads, and lets see how those work out. But as of right now there are no alternative monetization options.

Time will show if Facebook will really grow up to put up the features, experience, and monetize well enough. For now, we can take a look at some statistics and develop some fun innovations for Facebook mobile, because thats really missing! 

 

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Facebook has built a multi-billion dollar ecosystem with its application platform, but much of the growth of that platform has been driven by social games created by companies like Zynga.

In an effort to help the 900m-plus Facebook users discover apps of all shapes and sizes, and create new monetization opportunities for app developers, Facebook yesterday announced the launch of its own app store, the App Center.

App Center, which will be rolling out to Facebook users in the coming weeks, looks a lot like the app stores operated by companies such as Apple, Google and Amazon. As one might expect, it features directories of apps broken down by categories, which include Games, Lifestyle, Music, Sports and News, and each app that’s in the App Center has its own developer-populated page showing details about the app as well as screenshots.

The App Center is more than just an app directory, however. In an effort to entice developers into developing apps beyond social games (and increase the number of ways Facebook can profit from its ecosystem), Facebook is beta testing paid apps. These Facebook apps, like apps sold in Apple’s App Store and Google Play, will require users to pony up cash (most likely in the form of Facebook Credits) before they can be installed.

The world’s largest social network is also focusing on driving the growth of apps through mobile. As Facebook’s Aaron Brady explained, “The App Center is designed to grow mobile apps that use Facebook – whether they’re on iOS, Android or the mobile web. From the mobile App Center, users can browse apps that are compatible with their device, and if a mobile app requires installation, they will be sent to download the app from the App Store or Google Play.”

This may prove to be the most important aspect of the App Center. With more and more users accessing Facebook from mobile devices, mobile presents huge opportunities for Facebook. But right now it’s also the source of frustration for the soon-to-be-publicly-traded company, which yesterday amended its S-1 to further highlight the challenges it faces in monetizing mobile usage. And monetization isn’t the only problem: a growing number of companies that once focused on social games are shifting their attention to mobile games.

Ensuring that the App Center is mobile-friendly won’t immediately solve Facebook’s mobile problems, but it hints that the company will increasingly treat mobile as a first-class citizen when developing new features.

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Have a craving for a pizza? Normally, you’d have to step away from the computer and make a call, but the next time you’re hungry, you might not have to move or pick up the phone to fill your stomach.

If you happen to live in New Zealand or Australia, you can now place your order on Facebook instead thanks to Domino’s Pizza.

As reported by Showroom.co.nz, “Domino’s has designed and built an ordering capability into their Facebook pages to ensure customers can order their favourite pizza without leaving the site they spend significant time on each day.”

There are two versions of Domino’s Pizza’s Facebook app: one automatically shares a customer’s order with her friends, while the other allows a customer to decide what is shared with her social graph. Once an order is placed, a Pizza Tracker allows the soon-to-be-not-hungry customer to track the order process, and if the outcome of an order is as satisfying as Domino’s hopes it is, the company is even encouraging customers to ‘like’ their favorite pizzas.

The big question: will this drive substantial business, or is it just the latest eye-popping Facebook marketing initiative? Domino’s Pizza’s Australian Facebook Page has more than 570,000 likes, and its New Zealand Page has more than 156,000. That certainly gives it something to work with.

But Facebook commerce hasn’t always lived up to the hype — at least not yet — and just because we know that Facebook is ‘where the consumers are’ doesn’t mean that getting them to buy things while browsing around the world’s largest social network is an easy thing to do. The good news for Domino’s is that everybody eats, and when you want a pizza, you want a pizza. So getting someone to order an extra large with everything on it through Facebook may prove easier than selling, say, a watch or patio table.

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Click-through rates on Facebook ads have increased 50% over the past 12 months, according to data from Marin Software.

It also found that the cost-per-click of social ads increased by 26%, while the CPC of marketplace ads decreased by 26%.

Marin said the improvement in CTRs is thanks to Facebook’s new social ads, such as Sponsored Stories.

These ad formats are targeted based on brands that you and your friends have ‘liked’, which Facebook says makes them more relevant.

Sponsored Stories form part of Facebook’s strategy to encourage businesses to pay for ads to complement their existing brand pages.

As we all know, if Facebook can prove the success of its social ads then the revenue potential is massive.

Econsultancy’s new Facebook Pages for Business Best Practice Guide includes data that shows 65% of companies use Facebook as part of their marketing strategy.

Furthermore, in October 2011 Facebook reached more than half (55%) of the world’s global audience.

So if it can encourage even a small proportion of businesses already using its platform to pay for Sponsored Stories then it can easily justify its $ 90bn IPO.

However the social network does not publish CTRs for its social ads, instead suggesting that CTRs are irrelevant.

It claims that you can’t click on a TV ad, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t encourage you to buy a product.

While Marin has also failed to publish what the 50% increase equates to, the accepted CTR for Facebook ads is less than 0.03%, so any increase on that will be welcomed by Facebook.

Marin’s statistics also show that the amount of Facebook ad budgets allocated to social ads has risen from 3% to 26% globally over the past year.

It predicts that 50% of Facebook ad budgets will go to social ads by the end of 2012.

This tallies with data from Econsultancy’s Marketing Budget Report 2012 which shows that 70% of marketers plan to increase their budgets for off-site social media this year. 

However, almost 40% of companies believe they are poor at measuring ROI from this channel.

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A couple of months ago, Tanya Cordrey, the director of digital development for the Guardian, made a statement that raised some eyebrows. “It’s only a matter of time until social overtakes search for the Guardian,” she told attendees at the Guardian Changing Media Submit.

The impetus for that comment was the Guardian’s Facebook app, which enables Facebook users to share the articles they read on guardian.co.uk with their Facebook friends.

Such apps, which take advantage of Facebook’s “frictionless” sharing functionality, quickly became a hit with news organizations like the Guardian. And for good reason: with some 900m users and counting, Facebook is a potentially lucrative source of traffic.

But just as Facebook recently reminded brands that their fans aren’t really their fans, Facebook has apparently made some changes that are reminding the Guardians of the world that Facebook can turn the traffic spigot at any time, and not always for the better.

As first reported by Forbes’ Jeff Bercovici, the Washinton Post’s ‘social reader’ app on Facebook has seen its monthly active users drop from 17.4m to 9.2m in just the past 30 days. That’s bad news for the WaPo, which just turned in disappointing quarterly earnings. Like the Guardian, the Washington Post had been very bullish on social, and Facebook in particular, as Bercovici details:

It would be hard to overstate the importance and centrality of the Social Reader to the Post’s strategy. When I interviewed the Post Co.’s chief digital officer, Vijay Ravindran, earlier this year he pointed to the app as one of the company’s most promising new products, a way of bringing precious new younger readers to a franchise that has been otherwise challenged to reach them.

Unfortunately for other newspapers, the Washington Post isn’t an anomaly. As BuzzFeed’s John Herman points out, the Guardian has seen its daily active users drop from just under 600,000 to under 100,000 in the past month.

According to a tweet from the Washinton Post’s Ryan Kellett, the culprit for these declines is “evolving [Facebook] modules.” Put simply, Facebook made a change that reduced the prominence of stories from social reader apps and this is the result.

But that’s not the entire story. As BuzzFeed’s Herman notes, there seems to be plenty of celebration for the “demise” of these social reader apps. That isn’t entirely surprising. After all, these apps created a privacy stir when Facebook unveiled its “frictionless” sharing functionality.

Obviously, Facebook could make changes tomorrow and probably halt (if not reverse) the downward spiral of these apps. But for publishers like the Guardian and Washington Post, which had such high hopes for social traffic, the rapid decline of their Facebook apps is a reminder that Facebook isn’t a panacea, and Facebook will do what’s best for Facebook, not the publishers it occassionally plays nice with.

This, of course, doesn’t mean that there isn’t a role for social in their strategies going forward, but it should be clear now that betting the farm on Facebook probably isn’t a good idea.

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