Our next billion users will come primarily on mobile: Facebook

Facebook is definitely one of the most widely used social networking site across the globe. The company quite early on identified the potential of "mobile" and "social" and how these two will be governing the future  trends.

Early in March this year, Facebook acquired the London based American-Israeli technology company snaptu to further its  mobile expansion strategy. "We want to have every user in every market using Facebook– we’re investing in smartphones and at the same time as in mass market phones because we believe with great features and great integrations, every phone can become sociable," Facebook’s Head of Mobile Business, Henri Mossinac had stated at that time.

This was followed in July by Every Phone app. Aimed at offering a comprehensive Facebook experience on over 2,500 different phones, the app enabled Facebook lovers to upload photos and find friends from your phone’s contacts as well as use features like news feed and inbox. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook co-founder and CEO had stated that the site "has 750 million active users, out of which  250 million active users use mobile platforms to access the site."

Going forwards we will be possibly looking at more Facebook- mobile driven initiatives. At the Mobile Asia Conference being held right now in Hong Kong, Facebook VP for partnerships and corporate development Vaughan Smith was quoted as saying, “Facebook is the number one reason that people are buying mobile data and Facebook is the catalyst for people to spend more money on smarterphones. That’s going to enable our operator partners to make more money and to help take users to where we all want them to go."

According to mobilebusinessbriefing, Smith further said "Facebook views itself as a platform that developers can use to access social information. He also referred to the success of gaming company Zynga which is now one of the biggest games companies in the world four years after first building games on Facebook."

At present Facebook has a staggering 350 million of its 800 million users globally accessing it on mobile devices. With the potential for mobile growth, we will be seeing Facebook getting more and more people hooked up through mobile soon.