Facebook has its eyes on the future and has a pretty clear idea of where the social network is heading. The platform has evolved a lot since it first launched and there's no doubt that it will continue to do so as the way we communicate changes over time.
Now a place where users can write how they are feeling, share ideas and opinions via text, the company has been focusing on video content as of late with the release of features like Facebook Live and 360 Video.
And there's a really good reason why there's an emphasis on adding more videos: Facebook may very well be preparing for the day when the written word is obsolete.
During Fortune's Most Powerful Women International Summit in London on June 14, Vice President of Facebook in Europe, the Middle East and Africa Nicola Mendelsohn was asked where the platform will be in five years when it comes to mobile and videos. Mendelsohn responded that Facebook will "probably be all video."
So if Facebook will be most commonly used on mobile and be all video, what does this mean for the types of posts featured on News Feeds? According to Mendelsohn, the days of text posts could be numbered.
"We're seeing a year-on-year decline on text," she said.
In fact, more and more users are embracing video content. Mendelsohn revealed that the amount of video views on the platform increased from 1 to 8 billion daily in the past year. And watching videos is also extremely popular on mobile. Mobile users watch 100 million hours of video on average each day.
"If I was having a bet, I'd say: video, video, video," Mendelsohn stated about the future of Facebook.
This seems like a natural progression since people have become accustomed to sharing snippets of their everyday life via video on other apps. It may sound weird to imagine Facebook without text status updates, but this is the norm for the increasingly popular platform Snapchat.
The Facebook user of the future may just prefer to share, comment and get information on their News Feed via videos.
"The best way to tell stories in this world, where so much information is coming at us, actually is video," Mendelsohn said. "It commands so much more information in a much quicker period, so actually, the trend helps us to digest more of the information."
Facebook can already tell that video is what people want. Mendelsohn revealed that users have really embraced Facebook Live with it being bigger than what the company expected. It's these videos that get 10 times more comments than non-live videos.
This doesn't mean that people will soon forget how to write. Users will have to input text for videos too.
Then again, users who prefer text over video can just head over to Facebook Messenger to communicate with friends.
We'll see if Mendelsohn's predictions ring true in five years.
Source: Fortune
Photo: Christopher Corneschi | Flickr
