Facebook's strategy

At the Guardian's recent Changing Media Summit in London, Mattias Miksche, CEO if the amazingly successful Stardoll Media told delegates: "You have to have a Facebook strategy, because Facebook is eating the internet."  But does anyone know what Facebook's strategy is?

My guess is that Facebook is banking on mobile.  It's not just about the exponential growth in smartphones which I talked about in an earlier blog.  It's not just that sales of tablet devices like the iPad have hit sales of PCs (according to the Financial Times, shipments in quarter 1 2011 were down, despite healthy demand in emerging markets).

Two good indicators of Facebook's thinking are, firstly, a recent announcement regarding their moves in location-based social networking (another earlier blog) and secondly their acquistion of Snaptu, an Israeli company which makes applications allowing platforms like Facebook to run on the simpler 'feature phones' which came before the debut of iPhone and its smartphone competitors. 

Facebook's unprecedented subscriber growth in 2010-2011 means that to a large degree it has now reached much of the young, affluent, educated, web-connected audience that there is in the developed world.  In developing economies, though, there is considerably more internet activity via mobile phones than through fixed lines.  India, for example, has 50 million broadband connections but 950 million mobile phones. 

Perhaps more significantly are the developments happening in mobile banking in parts of Africa (see here for a special BBC report on the great strides being made in this field in Kenya).  If money is being moved around then Facebook and other internet companies want to know, but few people in developing countries like Kenya can afford iPhones. 

Accessing the web on feature phones is not easy, but Facebook would like to be our home page on this sort of device.  When social media becomes as central to your lives as it already is in Britain and America, why not trust Facebook with 'search' also?  Currently it doesn't offer a Google-type search function, but this is where the real money is being made.

My predictions are that in the next 12 months Facebook will continue to push into developing markets in Turkey, Africa, the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent, particularly in countries where there is a growing middle class and a young, educated population.  I think that they will partner with Microsoft to offer Bing search via Facebook, and that they will start rolling out 'Facebook Lite' to mobile phone users around the world not lucky enough to own an iPhone.