Social Media Saturday: Facebook Begins Unpacking Its App, Twitter Introduces More Ad Products, and LinkedIn Reaches 300 Million Users
This week in social media, Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg showed how serious he is about the company's "multi-app strategy," Twitter continued its evolution toward profitability with more ad products, and LinkedIn reached a milestone, thanks to expanding mobile. It's time for Social Media Saturday!
It's been clear that Facebook is interested in providing a range of apps, some without even the Facebook name, since the company bought Instagram in 2012. The company has pursued that plan, finding financial success in mobile, ever since, with the recent acquisition of WhatsApp being just the latest incarnation of its strategy.
But on Wednesday, in an exclusive interview with The New York Times' Farhad Manjoo, Zuckerberg revealed the extent to which the company will pursue its "multi-app" strategy: it's planning on taking apart its main app, with the help of Facebook's new innovation engine Creative Labs. "What we're doing with Creative Labs is basically unbundling the big blue app," said Zuckerberg, referring to the omnibus Facebook mobile app.
The company recently announced all Facebook messaging would be relegated to Facebook Messenger, for example, and WhatsApp will likely remain its own product too. But the company isn't being dogmatic about having multiple apps, each with its own pure function: just this week, Facebook's "Paper" news feed app got an update that added back notifications for birthdays and events.
Another update Facebook is rolling out for mobile will actually add a new feature to the "big blue app": Nearby Friends, which began rolling out on Thursday, allows users on iOS or Android to turn on location sharing and receive notifications when friends (also with the optional feature enabled) are nearby. Of course, as with every feature that gives Facebook more data, the company has reserved the right to share your location history for targeted ads, though that isn't happening yet.
Speaking of mobile ads, Twitter continued in its push towards being a profitable publically owned company by announcing a new suite of ad products for marketers. Called MoPub, a company that Twitter acquired last year for $350 million, the mobile app promotion suite will offer ad targeting and analytics to try to lure in more advertisers, and thus more revenue -- something the company needs to do.
On Friday, LinkedIn, the career-geared social network for professionals, celebrated a milestone. "There are now more than 300 million LinkedIn members in the world!" announced LinkedIn's Deep Nishar on the company's blog. He then went on to tell about LinkedIn's vision of creating an online network for "every one of the 3.3 billion people in the global workforce."
That's a pretty grand notion, but LinkedIn has had a lot of growth recently due to its mobile app. In fact, according to Nishar, LinkedIn mobile will account for more than 50 percent of all global traffic for the network sometime later this year. The company says it will continue partnerships with device manufacturers like Apple, Samsung and Nokia, and, outside of mobile, has a goal of connecting more than 140 million Chinese professionals to the network through its new Chinese site.
Having more than three billion members is a long way off -- even Facebook hasn't reached that number yet -- but LinkedIn seems confident they're on the path to growth and are happy enough about their 300 million member mark that they've provided a commemorative infographic: