Social Media Sunday: Facebook Dominates Wall Street, Twitter Shifting to News & Snapchat Video is Exploding
This week in social media, Facebook released its (amazing) quarterly earnings, Twitter released its (terrible) quarterly earnings. Meanwhile, Snapchat is apparently crushing it in online video.
It's time for Social Media Sunday!
Growth & Profits Galore
While 2016 hasn't been a great year for most of Silicon Valley on Wall Street, Facebook absolutely destroyed (in a good way) analysts expectations this week with its Q1 earnings report.
As Latin Post reported in detail, Facebook's revenue grew this year beyond the most bullish expectations, with 57 percent growth in ad revenue and 73 percent growth in mobile ad revenue over last year. The company also revealed it now has 1.65 billion active monthly users, leading to Facebook's stock hitting a record high share price of $120 the day after publishing its report.
Ensuring Zuckerberg's Reign
Facebook also revealed a strategy to bolster market investment while keeping control over the company with CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg.
The company's board of directors floated a plan to essentially split the stock by a factor of three to one, creating two "Class C" stocks for every currently existing shares. Class C stocks, importantly, carry the same fiscal weight as ordinary shares, minus the privilege of having a vote on anything at annual shareholders meetings.
Another Disappointment for Wall Street
As Facebook continues to dominate, Twitter stays stuck. And the company keeps getting pummeled on Wall Street.
This week, the company released another disappointing quarterly report -- or as The Verge appropriately headlined it, "Nothing Twitter is Doing is Working." The company's Q1 2016 report revealed earnings of $595 million, over $10 million under expectations, and a forecast for this quarter that disappointed investors as well.
Strategic Shift to News
Twitter various attempts to tweak its product or business structure have failed to change the bottom line: Face-lifting its interface, launching Moments, replacing its star icons with hearts, replacing the CEO -- all without results.
Now Newsweek is suggesting that Twitter will refocus its efforts away from being a social network to becoming a news app.
The evidence? Soon after its quarterly earnings report resulted in a 12 point dip in its stock, Twitter changed its app category in Apple's iOS App Store from "Social Networking" to "News."
Despite the fact that everyone goes to Facebook to get news, Twitter is loved by journalists -- even with all of its flaws -- mostly because other journalists post interesting articles, but also because Twitter still manages to be a standout breaking news platform.
Snapchat
Daily Video Doubles in a Year
Snapchat is becoming a video sharing platform more than anything else, according to a new report from Bloomberg.
The company revealed this week that more than a third of Snapchat's daily active users are broadcasting video using the "Stories" feature, and daily video viewing has increased from 8 billion video Snaps a day in February to 10 billion this week.
Comparisons to Facebook or YouTube are difficult -- due to Snapchat's generous definition of "video" and "view." As TechCrunch noted, Snapchat videos are 10 seconds long, so what might be the length of single, short video on YouTube can be several videos on Snapchat, which users put together into a "snap storm" in their "Story" page.
Nevertheless, there's no denying the growth in activity. Around this time last year, the number of daily video views were about half of what it is now.
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