The social network: inside Facebook Australia
It would be trite to describe Facebook's Sydney office as looking like it has been designed by a teenager. Far more accurately, the social media giant's King Street domain appears to have been thrown together by a very rich, savvy adolescent, possibly with plenty of help from British street artist Banksy.
In short, the walls decorated with graffiti art, high ceiling and obligatory table tennis table are exactly what you would expect from a company famous for its laid-back culture and quirky perks. Apparently Facebook Australia staff wanted to install a fireman's pole but unfortunately this idea was binned as a safety risk.
Nonetheless, online jobs and career community Glassdoor has Facebook in the US as fifth on its list of the 50 Best Places to Work in 2014, down from top spot in 2013.
While exact numbers for this fast-growing company are hard to pin down, a spokesperson for Facebook Australia said it had between 60 and 70 employees across its Sydney and Melbourne offices. There is also a small office in Auckland.
However, Neil Hiltz Facebook’s head of global vertical marketing for financial services and Paul McCrory, Facebook Australia’s head of travel and finance, are keen to talk about some far bigger figures.
To start with the company boasts 1.28 billion users worldwide — about one-sixth of the world's population — which, given that it is banned in China, is quite an achievement for a company that just celebrated its tenth birthday. Those users have made over 202 billion friend connections and clicked the 'like button' 3.5 trillion times. The number of cat videos watched is sadly not known.
The mobile decade
Facebook says 10 million Australians use the site every day and on a monthly basis this number rises to 12 million. But if the past decade was devoted to entrenching Facebook as the world's largest social network, then the next ten years are all about mobile.
"Mobile is a competing platform we have a decade to optimise on," said Hiltz.
Eighteen months ago Facebook didn't have any mobile products and today 59 per cent of its revenue comes from mobile, after a rapid evolution that initially saw Facebook struggle to adapt its busy website to the small screen.
The current strategy is to make the social network feel lean across all devices, with Facebook planning to conquer mobile one app at a time.
As CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at a results briefing earlier this year: “One theme that should be clear from our work on products like Messenger, Groups and Instagram is that our vision for Facebook is to create a set of products that help you share any kind of content you want with any audience you want.”
Hiltz and McCrory were not prepared to comment on UK speculation that Facebook is preparing to provide financial services in the form of remittances and electronic money.
Last month, The Financial Times reported that the social network was on the verge of obtaining regulatory approval in Ireland for a service that would allow its users to store money on Facebook and use it to pay and exchange money with others.
Future scenarios
These tentative steps into the payments space potentially puts Facebook on a slow collision course with bank clients who advertise on Facebook and who take advantage of its massive scale to interact with customers.
It isn't difficult to conceive of a future scenario where you see that a friend has a birthday coming up on Facebook and are able to select, deliver and pay for a gift without leaving the site. An example that is bound to concern the major banks.
Phil Gomm, CapGemini director and banking industry practice leader, said he wasn't surprised that Facebook is set to become an e-money institution.
“It is only when they are confident the demand is there that they develop a product, hence take up happens very quickly,” he told AB+F recently.
At the moment, making a spontaneous purchase, namely buying something that your Facebook friends are recommending, isn’t seamless, hence the disconnect between Gen Y’s expectations and what they can do, explained Gomm.
“Facebook is recognising this is where its customers want to transact today.”