Does your website have a mobile version yet? Do you feel like it’s important enough to really dedicate time to? Well, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg does. In a recent interview, he repeatedly cited mobile as the platform to focus on in coming years. As Facebook shifts it’s focus we may need to shift our marketing using Facebook as well.
When he spoke at the Techcrunch Disrupt conference this week in San Francisco, he acknowledged Facebook’s disappointing stock performance. When asked where he went wrong, he pointed towards a focus on HTML5 over mobile. He put it succinctly, saying, “We burned two years not working on mobile.”
This is a big admission from a man who doesn’t often admit missteps, but he seems prepared to remedy the mistake in a big way.
“It is really clear from the stats and my own personal intuition that a lot of energy in the ecosystem is going to mobile, not desktop,” Zuckerberg said. “Now we are a mobile company and all the code is being written in mobile, on mobile we are going to make a lot more money than on desktop.”
“That is the future.”
He was also asked about the rumors that Facebook is producing their own smart-phone, but he shot those down.
“It’s a juicy thing to say we’re building a phone, which is why people want to write about it. But it’s so clearly the wrong strategy for us,” he said. Clearly Zuck is more interested in the software side of things. At least we can all look forward to a future where the Facebook app for your mobile phone actually works, as the current iteration is sluggish and often times buggy.
Even if you don’t care about Facebook, there is still some value in the interview. It’s been clear that mobile is important for awhile now, but hopefully one of the most successful internet companies in history emphasizing it will convince any holdouts.