Following up on the news on HEXUS a couple of days ago about the Facebook IPO date, the official video to promote the Facebook investment opportunity to would-be investors has been released by the company. Facebook call this the “Net Roadshow” and you can watch it at the official link here, after agreeing to a couple of T&C type statements.
If you don’t have the time or patience to sit through that 30 minute video, with only play or pause controls, someone has uploaded a copy to YouTube where you can skip back and forth on the video as you wish. I’ve embedded that below.
Of course the video is a sales pitch for Facebook to potential investors. Venture Beat say the video will “tug at your heart, wallet” which I think describes its intentions perfectly. The video features Facebook big hitters, namely; Mark Zuckerberg, Chris Cox, Sheryl Sandberg and David Ebersman all pleading, in a warm cosy way, for your hard earned cash.
The video is structured into five parts to tell the Facebook story from the beginnings of the company in 2005 to now, and looking towards the future. However the video is not just fluff and there’s quite a bit of info about how Facebook makes money right now. I’ll go through some video highlights below.
The video starts with a mission statement as Mr Zuckerberg says idealistically: “People’s lives are going to be better. The whole world will function better if there’s more information and understanding out there.” Isn’t that nice?
Chris Cox has a compelling argument for publishers “Publishers want distribution and ‘eyeballs’, people who are coming to Facebook want interesting things to see from their friends." Sharing of content in this way has brought lots of new visitors to news sites like The Guardian.
On advertising, Sheryl Sandberg compares Facebook to competitors “(Facebook) offers reach, relevance, engagement and social context. Facebook reaches the audience with a 90 per cent accuracy compared to the industry average of 35 per cent.”Those are great numbers to appeal to advertisers, a major source of income.
Finally, looking starry eyed into the future Mark Zuckerberg says “Almost every app that you use is going to be integrated with Facebook in some way… so that you can interact with your friends and share content.” I found the future bit very vague, but on the other hand Facebook’s future success will be based upon new ideas and innovations so they wouldn’t want to give away any substantial information to competitors looking to outflank them.
