Meta has recently held their quarterly call to share their achievements and plans for the next months. Since the Q4 of the last year has marked a drastic change in the company’s positioning — coming out as Meta and a strong lean towards AR and VR — we have decided to dig a bit deeper into their plans.
Mark Zuckerberg has outlined 7 major points that will gather the most investment and attention in the upcoming months and maybe years.
Reels
There is much talk about short videos as the new black across different media platforms. Reels is Meta’s flagship in this regard, they are discussing the big transition from old engagement formats (Feed and Stories) to this new reality for both Instagram and Facebook. Reels format is also listed as the main monetization opportunity for years to come.
Community and business messaging
From its inception, Facebook has been about connecting with friends. Now the pendulum is going towards chatting with groups and messaging to businesses. Community and usefulness are the centers of gravity. WhatsApp will see better-organized chats, there will be Community Chats on Facebook and Messenger for real-time conversations.
When it comes to businesses, Meta wants to connect the consumer and the provider. The latest addition were Click to Messaging ads that open a Messenger, Instagram Direct, or WhatsApp chat with a business representative upon a click.
Commerce
Personalized ads and commerce tools make for a seamless journey from visitor to customer, and Meta wants to take it further. Shops were introduced a year and a half ago to ease the brand discovery. Ratings, reviews, and community replies to product questions have affected Checkout stability. The next step is immersive shopping experiences like Product Tags, Drops, and Live Shopping.
Ads
Apple’s iOS changes have become the main hurdle to delivering personalized ads, with lower accuracy of targeting and much underreporting. Machine learning is used to improve the targeting situation, while attribution and reporting are still a big issue that mostly hurts smaller campaigns and businesses, says Meta. By now, Aggregated Events Measurement is the solution Meta has to offer to deliver better insights for advertisers.
Privacy
The network has been rebuilding its privacy program and privacy review process. Some examples are end-to-end encrypted backups and disappearing messages on WhatsApp, and end-to-end encrypted voice and video calling on Messenger.
AI
Artificial intelligence will play a major role in building the metaverse. The latest AI installment that has been announced recently is AI Research SuperCluster that Meta presents as the candidate for the world’s fastest supercomputer.
Metaverse
This big enterprise will take years and billions of dollars before we see the result, though the company has registered some patents for biometric data processing solutions. The hardware end focuses on Oculus Quest 2 equipment that is seeing considerable demand. A high-end virtual reality headset is scheduled for release later in 2022. Project Nazare, Meta’s first fully-augmented reality glasses, are also in progress.
As for software, Horizon is the core of the metaverse. A mobile version of Horizon will be launched in 2022 for a better VR experience. In theory, Horizon will not simply be an immersive VR, but will support 2D screens as well, so that you could potentially jump into those kinds of worlds from Facebook or Instagram or different apps as well.
2021 stats in short
- Total ad revenue in Q4 was $32.6B, which is up 20% year-over-year.
- 2021 has also marked more than $100B in annual revenue.
- The biggest revenue growth: Asia Pacific at 31%.
- The total number of ad impressions (per quarter) across our services increased by 13% and the average price per ad increased by 6%.
- Facebook daily active users — 1.93 billion (+5% compared to last year).
If you want to reach new GEOs and audiences, maybe it is all waiting for you on Telegram? We’ve prepared some material about Telegram audiences. What are the messenger’s users like this year? How old they are, what they do, and what they are interested in!
