Facebook Inc (FB), Google Inc (GOOG): How This Social Networking Site Will Continue to Grow

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Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) bashers have been criticizing the social networking company since its overpriced IPO in May 2012. But the company’s recent earnings report showed that Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) has finally turned a corner. With revenue and earnings per share of $1.81 billion and $0.19, respectively, Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) crushed analyst expectations of $1.6 billion in revenue and $0.14 earnings per share. Those impressive numbers are just the beginning of CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s overall goals.

Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB)3 Goals

Zuckerberg has said that Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB)’s 3 goals are to connect everyone, understand the world, and help build the knowledge economy.

Connecting everyone means getting Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) to the remaining 5 billion people who aren’t already part of the community. In the last quarter, the company added 45 million monthly users. In addition, total daily users have increased to 700 million.

Current users total roughly 1.15 billion people, who spent a combined 20 billion minutes a day on Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB)during June. Facebook connects more people than any other social networking site, and the number continues to grow.

Understanding the world means using people’s day-to-day updates in order to create a global store of information. Facebook will use that data to build services that will help users answer specific questions based on the network of friends they’ve built on the site.

Building the knowledge economy means creating an economy where growth depends on quantity, quality, and accessibility of information. Facebook will grow the knowledge economy by gathering consumer information from its members. Using this information, companies will be able to market to specific customers.  There are currently 1 million active advertisers on Facebook — double the year-ago number. In addition, 18 million local businesses use Facebook pages for promotion.

In the last quarter, Facebook’s advertising revenue grew 61% to $1.6 billion. This growth was driven by mobile advertising, which provided 41% of total revenue, up from 30% in the first quarter of 2013. Before the second-quarter results were in, Facebook received criticism on its mobile capabilities and potential for monetization. With this success, Facebook has taken a step toward overcoming one of its biggest challenges.

While these three  goals seem large, Facebook has made progress toward achieving them, and will continue working on them as its Wall Street momentum increases.

Mobile competition

Facebook’s No. 1 competitor is Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG). In its most recent quarter, Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) posted revenues of $14 billion — a 19% increase year over year — but still missed analyst estimates of $14.5 billion.

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