How Facebook plans to win over 3 billion people in emerging markets

Last week, the company rolled out Slideshow, a new lightweight ad format that is meant to render across devices, bringing video to low-bandwidth emerging markets.

Slideshow promises to reduce the need for video production time and resources as businesses can use their own images or simply pull stock imagery from Facebook’s library. With the latest offering, a 15-second slideshow can be up to five times smaller in file size than a video of the same length.

Within the region, the new format has been used by Reckitt Benckiser's Dettol in Indonesia to extend the reach of a video campaign. The FMCG giant used the social network’s device and bandwidth targeting feature to deliver a Slideshow ad to people on lower-connectivity devices.

During the launch event—live streamed from Facebook's Menlo Park and London offices—the team stressed the importance of connecting the next billion users, primarily in the emerging markets of India and Africa. At stake is 85 per cent of the world’s population and 3 billion potential users outside the BRIC markets that contribute 60 per cent of GDP growth.

Speaking on its emerging market push, Facebook shared the firm’s three-pronged approach to tapping and monetising these high-growth economies.

Reaching everyone

About two and a half years ago Facebook had a “small, scrappy” team working on an emerging market push and building foundational products that enabled brands to reach people on feature phones. Now the social network is working hard to reach everyone and takes on the onus of creating products that render “natively and beautifully”.

Reaching everyone across any level of connectivity

“We’ve needed to learn how to build products that work in no-connectivity conditions,” said Tom Alison, engineering director, emerging markets. To achieve that, Facebook sent its engineers to different places to do field research and collect diagnostics of how networks perform in these markets.

An outcome of this can be seen in lower-bandwidth regions where the Facebook application prioritises displaying stories that the user is currently looking at as opposed to loading all newsfeed content at once.

Nikhila Srinivasan, director of emerging markets monetization, said Facebook has now built the ability to target people based on their connectivity at a time when they would find it most engaging.

How and when people want to connect

For the team, it was really obvious that mobile and video were exploding. Most people who come online watch at least one video a day, and that is an “incredible opportunity” for Facebook, according to the company. “As a product organisation we want to make videos easily discoverable," Srinivasan said. "However, as an emerging markets team we do recognise that producing a video requires effort and we want to find quick and cost effective solutions for small businesses.”