Trying to predict where a tech company will be in five years is a tricky task, given the current pace of innovation, but Nicola Mendelsohn, vice president for Facebook in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, gave it a shot on Tuesday.
When asked at Fortune‘s Most Powerful Women International Summit in London where Facebook would be in a half decade in terms of mobile and video, Mendelsohn said the social network would “definitely” be mobile, and would “probably” be “all video.”
“If I was having a bet,” she said, “it’d be video, video, video.” Video content on Facebook (FB), Mendelsohn said, is growing even more quickly than the company anticipated. And the social network’s new live video feature is also “a bigger, faster phenomenon” than Facebook expected. “People are loving the behind-the-scenes content” on Facebook Live, said Mendelsohn, who oversees 433 million users in the EMEA region. Live videos, she says, receive ten times more comments than pre-recorded videos. “So engagement is much higher,” she says.
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Facebook users watch an average of 100 million hours of video on mobile every day. Daily views have increased from 1 billion to 8 billion in one year’s time. Text posts, meanwhile, are declining year on year, she said.
Mendelsohn believes the shift towards video is valuable in an era of storytelling. “I think it helps us edit,” she said. “The best way to tell stories in this world— where so much information is coming at us—actually is video. It commands so much information in a much quicker period so actually the trend helps us digest more of the information in a quicker way.”
