So much for young users leaving Facebook en masse… Facebook’s latest results (Q2 2014) are simply stunning:

• $2.91bn revenue (from $1.8bn in 2013)
• $791m profit (from $333m in 2013)
• Daily active users (DAUs) were 829 million on average for June 2014, an increase of 19% year-over-year.
• Mobile DAUs were 654 million on average for June 2014, an increase of 39% year-over-year.
• Monthly active users (MAUs) were 1.32 billion as of June 30, 2014, an increase of 14% year-over-year. This is an amazing statistic – 18% of the world’s population access Facebook monthly!
• Mobile MAUs were 1.07 billion as of June 30, 2014, an increase of 31% year-over-year.

My only word of caution from this update is that $2.68bn of the $2.91bn revenue is advertising – far too high a percentage (92%) in my opinion. A more stable business model, such as e-commerce (selling really stuff) or (person to person) payments should be a higher proportion.

The main takeaway from the results though, is how users want to communicate on social networks more than any other channel.

Yammer update

From a consumer social network to enterprise… we’ve been using Yammer at Endava since the end of 2010. We started using it as an experiment – we literally installed the free version, invited a few close colleagues, and let it filter across the organisation.

We now have a few hundred users on Yammer, and after a lull in usage, it’s become much more popular again. One of the main reasons for this is that we now have more international offices, and it’s an easier way to share information.

Lync and Skype are still used for one-to-one, or one-to-a-few. Email is just horrible (especially one-liners such as “Have you seen this cool site…”), so Yammer fits the one-to-many communication.

Microsoft acquired Yammer in 2012 and it’s interesting that we now use three different Microsoft IM (Instant Messaging) clients, plus Outlook!

We have one partner who is using Yammer to run one of their projects. They made a decision not to use email whatsoever on the project, only Yammer. That way, everyone can see all project communications and the message threads are easier to track (remember Google Wave?) than email.

It’s interesting how products such as Facebook and Yammer have changed the way we regularly communicate in our personal and business lives. And hopefully soon we won’t be using email at all.