Facebook announces Q2 earnings

Adding numbers

• More than 1.7 billion people now use Facebook each month and 1.1 billion each day
  
• It added over 200 million people using Facebook on a monthly basis
  
• Over one billion people accessing Facebook via mobile devices on an average day in June, up 22% compared to last year.
  
• In the second quarter, time spent per person increased double digit percentages year-over-year across Facebook, Instagram and Messenger.

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Q2 2016 revenue and business growth:

• US, Canada and Asia-Pacific were its fastest growing regions, with advertising growth rates of 69% and 67%, respectively. In the second quarter, time spent per person increased double digit percentages year-over-year across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger.
  
• Over 60 million monthly active business Pages on Facebook

Future over three, five and 10 years

Over the next three years, it is focused on continuing to build its community and help people share more of what matters to them:

• Made improvements to core apps to make them work regardless of the device or connection speed;
  
• Built a light-weight version of its Android app, called Facebook Lite, used by more than 100 million people.
  
• Live video: Candace Payne's Chewbacca mask video was viewed almost 160 million times, news organisations and delegates go Live from the Republican and Democratic convention, and in Minnesota and Dallas Live shined a light on important moments.
  
• Launched 360 photos, with more than four million 360 photos shared on Facebook, with one million more being shared every week.
  
• People are searching across more than 2.5 trillion posts conducting more than two billion searches a day.

The next five years are about building its products into full ecosystems with developers and businesses:

• Instagram now has more than 500 million monthly actives, with more than 300 million daily. It moved to a ranked feed and is seeing a positive impact in terms of time spent and the amount of content people are sharing.
  
• More than one billion people are using Messenger every month. WhatsApp has a community of more than one billion people. This quarter, it launched new desktop apps and end-to-end encryption and millions of people are using WhatsApp's voice calling features.

Over the next ten years, it is working to build new technologies to help everyone connect in new ways:

• First successful flight of Aquila, the solar-powered aircraft that will beam internet to places that have never been connected.
  
• Announced DeepText, a deep learning-based engine that can understand the context of several thousand posts per second, across 20 languages
  
• More than one million people a month are using Oculus on mobile phones through its Gear VR partnership with Samsung; more than 300 apps available at the Oculus store for Gear VR

Ad priorities

In Q1, it continues to make progress on three priorities in ads:
Capitalising on the shift to mobile:

• The goal is to create ‘thumb-stopping creative’ — videos that grab attention in the first few seconds:
  • For Sour Patch Kids Gum, Mondelēz targeted teens with non-chocolate candy interests. Working with VaynerMedia, Carat and the Facebook Creative Shop, it created punchy 10-second looping videos tailored for Facebook and Instagram. The campaign helped the Sour Patch Kids portfolio beat sales benchmarks for the entire candy industry.

• Expanded Audience Network to include video for brand objectives: advertisers can use brand video ads not just on Facebook and Instagram but across a network of apps and sites

Growing the number of marketers using its ad products:

• Facebook Pages are the mobile solution for many of the over 60 million businesses using the product each month around the world.
  
• Over 85% of active business Pages use mobile and 40% of active advertisers have created a Facebook ad on mobile. In Q2, it rolled out new tools to make it easier for businesses to promote posts and track performance directly from the Instagram app.
  
• Over 80% of new advertisers in Q2 started with simplified products, such as boosted posts.
  • Lighting Etc, a third-generation family-owned business, used Facebook and Instagram ads to drive in-store sales. It targeted 25-45-year-old homeowners interested in interior design, living within 35 miles of its showroom in Fort Worth, Texas. It was striking that the size of the community on Facebook meant it could reach over 300 000 people, even with such specific targeting. It has seen a 40% increase in revenue in 2016 and it attributes this increase to its ads on Facebook and Instagram.

Making ads more relevant and effective:

• Businesses are seeing strong results from immersive formats such as Video and Canvas Ads.
  
• Introduced Lead Ads in Q1 to make it easy for people to fill out forms on mobile devices right from News Feed. In Q2, it made it possible for advertisers to retarget people who opened or completed a Lead Ad form
  • Nissan Turkey and the SEM Agency used Lead Ads to collect over 20,000 high-quality leads from people interested in buying a new car. They then used retargeting to show relevant ads to people who had completed these Lead Ads and ultimately drove vehicle sales. Facebook Lead Ads had a 9.3x lower form submission cost compared to all other online media.

• Dynamic Ads allow advertisers to upload their product catalogue and target people with specific products in real-time. Over 300 million people see Dynamic Ads each month and marketers have uploaded over 2.5 billion unique products. In Q2, it expanded Dynamic Ads to Instagram and also launched Dynamic Ads for Travel. For example, one can now advertise hotel rooms available for specific destinations and dates.