Facebook Has Positive First Quarter

Facebook’s first quarter results released on Wednesday revealed that its monthly active users rose by 23 percent compared with the same period in 2012. This puts active Facebook users at 1.11 billion, with up to 751 million users accessing the network from mobile devices. An average of 665 million users visited the world’s number one social media platform every day in the month of March. First quarter revenue totaled $1.46 billion, reflecting an increase of 38 percent over last year’s $1.06 billion.

Following its rocky and much publicized IPO, Facebook appears to be settling into its role as a stock market listed company. Referring to the company’s first quarter results, founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg noted that Facebook had made a lot of progress, launching several new products and seeing strong growth. He also announced that the photo-sharing platform Instagram has 100 million users. Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion last year.

Advertising raked in $1.25 billion for Facebook, with up to 30 percent being from mobile users. Advertising revenue increased by 43 percent compared with last year and accounts for 85 percent of the company’s total revenue. As more and more users switch to mobile, Facebook is investing in development focused on this group. Last month saw the launch of Facebook Home, which allows people to use Facebook to organize their smartphones, and acquired Parse to assist developers in building apps capable of being used across mobile devices and platforms. However, financial analysts have noted that the response to Facebook Home has been weak, with complaints from more than half the users of the software, which could be damaging to the company.

In Facebook’s favor is the fact that they have access to a significant amount of user information, allowing the company to fine-tune the data and advertising to suit individual users, as well as to develop its search credentials. Certainly, there are plenty of reasons to expect Facebook to be around for the foreseeable future.