The Future of Facebook: Video, Search, Messaging and VR

Facebook has been around for several years now, and has grown extensively since it first arrived. The founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerburg, is constantly looking for ways to evolve the social networking site.
Over the years Facebook has changed in many ways. Starting from a basic layout and minimal functions to what we use worldwide today.

Zuckerberg stated that they continue to see excellent growth and over the past year Facebook has added over 200 million people using Facebook on a monthly basis. The time spent per person on Facebook, Instagram and Messenger have doubled in percentage over the past year, and that doesn’t even include WhatsApp yet.

Plans for future

Next in the plans for Facebook is Facebook Search competing with Google, Twitter and LinkedIn. Google has a market cap of $520 billion, with most being credited to its search business, while Facebook has a market cap of $362 billion. Facebook is always looking for ways to focus on monetization opportunities, therefore seeking to compete with LinkedIn in the near future as the business platform of record.

Facebook has focused on video for the past 6 months, particularly on Live video. Live represents a new way to share what’s happening in more immediate and creative ways. It is predicted that in 5 years the news feed will all be video.

Since Facebook bought Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion, the aim for Facebook is to make Instagram stronger by connecting everyone in the world. It is a foothold for the younger generation and its active user base is not a clone of Facebook’s so it expands the corporate Facebook’s universe of connectivity and engagement. Not only this but Facebook sees a huge opportunity in messaging, as this moves them closer to their goal is connecting everyone on a constant basis. This is why $22 billion was paid for WhatsApp in 2014 which is a service that barely had a business model.

Virtual reality is a big area of investment for Facebook, especially since purchasing Oculus in 2014 for $2 billion. The future of VR is undecided, but will be deeply engrained in advertising in the future.

Mark Zuckerburg has a few big ideas for Facebook within the next 10 year plan, all pointing to growing the community and connecting the world. Big investments and taking risks is just the start of it, focusing not just on what Facebook is, but on what it can be.