Facebook feeds may become much livelier in the next five years. On Tuesday at a Fortune event, Nicola Mendelsohn, vice president for Facebook in the Middle East, Africa, and Europe, said the social network could become “all video” within the next half decade, adding, “If I was having a bet, it’d be video, video, video.”
Videos – the next big thing
According to Fortune, Mendelsohn said at its Most Powerful Women International Summit in London that the social networking site would be mobile “definitely” and probably be all video within the next five years. Mendelsohn supervises 433 million users in her region and said people love the behind-the-scenes content.
Fortune reported her saying that Facebook Live is “a bigger, faster phenomenon” than the company expected. Currently on average, users watch 100 million hours of video on the platform on mobile devices per day. Also according to the report, daily views have hiked to 8 billion from 1 billion in one year. She said on the stage that the best way to tell stories in this world when so much information is coming at people is through video.
“It conveys so much more information in a much quicker period. So actually the trend helps us to digest much more information,” she said.
Facebook’s aspiration to go “all video” does not really say anything about the reality of human communications. Conversation is a many-headed beast and a multi-format activity, and this will not change, no matter what the social media giant does, says TechCrunch.
Will Facebook retire Messenger?
Mendelsohn said the strategic imperative for the social media giant will be to continue promoting video on its platform over and over and above other types of content as video is the best medium for displaying advertising. Also Mendelsohn was quoted as saying, “We’re seeing a year-on-year decline of text…”
Despite the popularity of videos, the social networking site will not be retiring Messenger. Combined activity on WhatsApp and Messenger is three times the global volume of SMS messages now, with around 60 billion messages sent per day versus 20 billion SMSes, said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in April at the F8 conference.
People are now switching to more fully-featured texting platforms, so a decline in SMS is no surprise. But a decline in text messages is not the case as people are messaging more than before. Mendelsohn also suggested that virtual reality is set to grow and that 360 videos will be “commonplace.”
