After creating the social networking space, Facebook is now looking to make a splash in the instant messaging space.
More than 10 billion messages are sent each day in total on Facebook.
As of the beginning of this year, there were around four times as many mobile messages sent each day as there were at the beginning of 2012.
The company has announced a mobile first strategy under which it has launched a Facebook for Every Phone app that enables users with feature phones to get access to messaging and social networking site.
Business Line spoke with Aaron Goldsmid, Product Manager, Facebook Messenger, to know the company’s plans to grow its messaging platform in a highly competitive market.
What was the thinking behind getting into messaging?
Our mission at Facebook is connecting people. There are times when you want to say something to your friends privately and then there are times when you want to broadcast something. Newsfeed and Timeline allow broad sharing. So messaging was an organic and a natural part of our mission.
How will you differentiate in a market dominated by players like Whatsapp?
We, at Facebook, have over one billion users. More than half of the Indians on Internet are on Facebook. This gives you the ability to connect with almost anyone you want, which is an extremely powerful thing.
It is a great place for to share your content such as photos. In the mobile space, we have recently done a coupe of things that we are quite proud of and that has helped make Messaging for fun and much more useful. Chat Heads is one such example. It allows you to have a more rich conversation. The idea was to better connect people emotionally through devices via messaging and photo sharing. Combine that with the reach of Facebook and you get a pretty compelling experience.
How’s been the uptake and adoption of the Messenger?
Each day, over 10 billion messages are exchanged over Facebook. We’ve seen about 4X growth since the beginning of the year on mobile. One of the things is really interesting is our ‘Facebook For Every Phone’ app. Even if you don’t have a smart phone but have a feature phone or a Symbian/ Android/iOS device, you can still experience Facebook. And that’s because we want to connect people and so we have to embrace all devices. Number of messages sent using the ‘Facebook For Every Phone’ app has gone up 10X since last year and so there is a huge growth opportunity.
Do you have a monetising strategy in place?
Our focus right now is really on connecting users, and to enhance the messaging experience. Our energies are not being spent on monetisation because there’s still a lot of work to be done towards creating a great private sharing messaging ecosystem.
Would you say that Facebook Messenger is the next big thing for Facebook?
We’re doing a lot of other interesting things but Messaging is an important part of our growth strategy.
Over the years, we’ve done really well at listening to our users and providing them with ways to connect the way they wanted to - in smaller, personal groups and share privately.
In that respect, our Web chat was extremely successful a few years back and similarly messaging is now a critical part of our mobile first strategy.
How does Facebook develop emoticons or Stickers?
We were working with psychology researchers to understand how human communicate and perceive emotions.
We created an emotional pictionary using science w.r.t. how eyes look at times when you feel humble, quiet, happy or sad. Then we got some great illustrators and artists from the Facebook Design Community to marry this science with art and created this solution to express and communicate emotions through a mobile device, while at the same time making it fun and relevant for every user.