"The most concerning of these to me is time spent.
Most of these goals I view as in our control, but time spent seems more subject to macro trends we're just trying to predict around the balance of apps people will use and Facebook's place among them.
If we think we're doing the right things to drive time spent and the number still isn't increasing much, that suggests our thesis on how we expect people broadly to spend time and use different apps could be wrong.
That might imply our core product growth is flat or close to falling into decline, which would mean we'd need to very rapidly shift emphasis to other areas to accelerate future growth, like in messaging.
It's too early to conclude how this will look at the end of Q2, especially with all the measurement issues. But if we end up meaningfully below our goal here, we'll need to have some tough conversations about where we focus to make sure we're spending our time building the products people will increasingly want in the future.
Of course the other goals are all important as well, but this is the one that threatens our core narrative the most."
"Here's 1 more story that's pretty neat: The team thought it might be fun for teens to access Teen Feed by shaking their phones. When teens tried that out a couple weeks ago, they said it was kinda cool, but that it wouldn't work because if they did that during class, the teacher would notice and they'd get in trouble. We learned one of the things we need to optimize for is sneaking a look at your phone under your desk in the middle of Chemistry :)"
"13. Are there any controversial or "FB unfriendly" headlines that someone (e.g. a Facebook critic who may be looking for "clicks") could write about this paper? We are asking this question so that you can help us think through (and potentially help mitigate!) the potential PR/Policy risks with your paper.
The paper discusses individuals' expectation of feedback and so one could think up a headline along the lines of 'Facebook users conditioned to seek feedback' or some sort of Pavlovian reference. However, not sure how likely that would be."
"quick thought on today's hc planning exercise"
"Felt like we were over-indexed towards the leadership and team that we have and our ability to execute than thinking about the big bets that will get us to a great place in a few years. Would be great for us to come up with a common framework of how to think about this exercise"
- "should we optimize for the one year or 3 year horizon ?"
- "Should we be doing fewer things better ?"
- "should we optimize for people or should we be changing these teams to make things happen ?"
- "what % of what we do should be big bets/long term investment versus what gives us increment time spent ?"
- "For incremental TS, what are the main areas/drivers that will give us the additional TS ?"
- "For strategic long term investment, what are the areas that we need to invest in ?"
"I think the conversation had all the elements but IMHO was not that structured and hence not easy to find the right level of investment."
"My 2c. Feel free to ignore :-)"
Emily Eckert:
• "Our vertical model is working well. With a larger team, we are expanding to new verticals and deepening our focus in top markets."
◦ "Keep: Public Figures, Music, Fashion, Teens, Photography"
◦ "New Investment: Sports, Publishing/News (this is about giving media orgs from from magazines to broadcasters a sustained level of partnerships support; this is not a goal to win in news)"
◦ "Possible addition: SMB"
◦ "Major H1 moments:Awards Season, Olympics, Election, Instagram moments (look for a few potential opportunities to create our own impactful moments like #InstaPride)"
• "Emphasis on driving time spent. During H1, we will approach major moments(Awards Show, Olympics, etc.) with an explicit goal around moving time spent. We will support our company-wide time spent goals by supporting initiatives around Video, Live Events, and Ranked Feed."
████: "Teens /Youth Focus is particularly critical to our brand and overall success in partnerships. This is also a space that is increasingly competitive. We are weaving this focus area into all of our market and vertical plans."
"Here's what I have written for what I hope we accomplish in 2016:"
[3 Year Arc]:
- "Time spent increases by 12%"
- "Teen trend is reversed"
[Key Countries]:
- "US: teens, sharing, engagement, sentiment"
"We don't need company goals for all of these, but a few things stood out to me:"
- "Teens and innovation brand are two areas that we're starting to work on more seriously but won't have quantitative goals around for H1. We should still list them with a goal to come up with a longer term goal for H2."
- "Overall time spent goal is still being discussed. I think we should shoot for better than 10%."
"Globally, under-13s are deeply under-served for social sharing"
"Regulations like US COPPA have restricted growth of kid-kid or kid-parent social networks"
[Our Key Hypotheses, 3]: "Adults are Toxic Unless we allow teens to share separately from adults, the rest of world will inevitably follow the decline of teen engagement in the US and EU. We should invest in better audience, tools, graph segmentation for new teen users, and teen-centric growth, friending, and ranking."
[Our Key Hypotheses, 5]: "5-10 year olds are our best initial U13 segment, allowing us to building on FB parent strength to grow a portable graph for young kids who will become future teens. 11-13yo 'tweens' can fast follow in 2018, perhaps on IG."
[Our Big 2017 Bets, Under 13s]: "Deliver social value to enormous untapped market of kids and parents."
[Three-Year Goal, EOY 2019]: "A Facebook family app is the #1 social app for every teen worldwide, with >60% social TS share."
[One-Year Goal, EOY 2017]:
• "We have increased FB family teen time spent by X%"
• "We have launched new experiences to under-13 users to serve the next generation of teens"
[H1 2017 Top-Line Goals]:
• "X% increase in teens time spent in the [United States] via Instagram"
• "X% increase in teens time spent in Row and Europe via Facebook"
"We have a significant DAP and Engagement (TS/DAP) problem with Teens and Young Adult people in the US. This is worse than we previously thought and getting worse over time. We know this is true in other markets (!US) and are in the process of getting analogous data."
"This is not a FB Blue-app only problem. This is a FB Family problem. Our aggregate time spent share and retention for this segment is going down. Snapchat in particular and YT are gaining share in this segment."
"68% of U.S. Teenagers are currently MAP on Facebook. 2 years ago 90% were. We expect this decline to continue as existing teens grow-up and new ones don't join."
"Why didn't we realize this sooner?"
• "We have had various teams looking at Teens for many years but only recently realized the seriousness of the problem: why?"
• "30-40% of teens are registered as being >18; we have to model ages for accurate metrics"
• "Our age model was incorrect since 2014"
• "We updated the model in Q4 2015 to get to our current understanding of the situation"
"We must 'win over' teens, not 'win back'"
"Learning: Must solve problems for teens in a way that is significantly better than the existing products/solutions they use"
"We are creating a centralized team in Engagement that is responsible for Teen growth (DAP population penetration) and engagement (TS/DAP), primarily focusing on FB Blue (and a handful of new apps)."
Child sexual exploitationBody image & eating disordersLive StreamingNotifications
"I'm excited about pushing ahead as fast as we can on Live because it is the most unique and promising new development in two spaces we care about deeply but are behind in: video and teens... This can be the beachhead we need to expand into other use cases in video and teens."
"Ramp up push notifs and NF ranking. If we want to grow reach, these seem like the two biggest levers we have. we should prioritize them to have this widely rolled out by the end of March."
"Public figure incentive program. When we do our launch, we should have many public figures -- especially teens -- ready to start producing content."
"I think it would be reasonable to spend $100-200 million per year worldwide on a program like this to start. This would span teen celebs, YouTube/Snapchat/Vine stars, other already prominent figures -- and ideally people who aren't strictly media entertainers, like athletes, journalists, scientists, doctors or even politicians if we can figure out a way to do that."
"First, getting notifications, badges and the UI around subscriptions right is key for engagement. I'm assuming we'll notify you and badge the tab whenever someone you're subscribed to (and we think you'll be interested in) goes live. I'm also assuming we'll automatically subscribe you to your friends and everyone you follow, but will have to algorithmically prune some notifications to prevent people and especially pages from using this to spam. These notifications and badges will be critical for engagement. The notifications will let people know they can tune in now. The badges will last until you visit the video tab, so they'll also surface recent
Lives that are no longer currently active as well."
"Second, getting privacy right will be key -- especially for teens -- for encouraging use of Live as a sharing tool rather than just for consumption."
"The reality is, if a normal person broadcasts publicly, their friends will all get notified and that will be the majority of the audience they get. But they're explicitly deciding to share publicly, so they won't really mind if their parents, teachers or coworkers see them."
"When people really want to share with their friends though, I wonder if their 'friends' audience is too big for content this raw. It feels like we'd be better off either encouraging them to make a new audience completely from scratch, or at a minimum automatically limiting it to people their age so it excludes parents, teachers, etc."
"Finding a good privacy model is key to making this work for teens. If we don't do this, then even if the medium of live video sharing takes off, teens will eventually migrate to a different platform to do it. But on the plus side, if we build a new audience to enable people to do this here, then that audience could be useful for other forms of sharing across the service as well."
"There is also an element of just following attractive people. A lot of the most popular accounts on Instagram and Snapchat are models or attractive celebrities, and people just spend a lot of time watching their clips and looking at them. A lot of the Explore behavior on Instagram today is this. We could enable some of this through 'fashion' or 'celebrities' topics, but for the long tail of gawking I could definitely see people spending lots of time browsing public Lives of people of their preferred gender/age around the world. And it wouldn't be creepy because the people broadcasting explicitly want to have people watching them.)"
"However, I'm worried that even if Live is a new raw format that young people enjoy, they may quickly migrate to a standalone product with a clean graph if we don't fix our graph issues for this audience. That is, they may like Live, but still not want to live stream to their parents and all their FB friends."
"If we tell teens' parents and teachers about their live videos, that will probably ruin the product from the start. At the same time, even blasting notifs to many of your young friends may require a different graph to make sure you don't feel like you're spamming people by going live. My guess is we'll need to be very good about not notifying parents / teachers, and then also use machine learning to find the optimal balance between sending enough notifs to get producers enough audience while also not having people feel like we're spamming."
[Facebook Australia Insights]: "Each Half Year, Marketing Science can present a summary of relevant studies and key findings to agencies, detailing studies relevant to their clients."
"We answer questions on a vertical or category level, including:"
• "Trending Facebook 'moments' within audience groups and concerning specific topic areas (see example)"
• "How audiences are representing emotion and communicating visually"
"Example: Moments when young people need a confidence boost"
"Posts about confidence are associated with four categories of emotions, in relation to their valence, and proximity to the 'moment' they refer to"
████:
[Lifestage Questions]:
"1. How is CO going to monitor and review reports? Will it be exactly the same process and standards that are used for FB content?"
"2. How will we be deciding who is a fraudulent account when people report specific users? Since we don't have a real name policy and have no way or verifying whether a student actually attends a school, how will those calls to remove people from the app be made?"
"3. Are we using nudity or porn filters?"
"4. Will there be an age cap? I saw that this was discussed in the privacy XFN last week but wasn't sure where it netted out."
"5. Lastly, has Lifestage been through a product security review? If not, ████ suggested that one can be set up and can help us get that done."
████: "I was able to get answers to most of the questions that came up in our meeting and got an update on the latest launch plan that ████ worked on following our feedback. TLDR is that they're relying on existing CO analysts and processes but it's still unclear how they'll be evaluating reported content, there is no age cap (they are relying on people reporting non-students, impersonators), there are no nudity or porn filters in the app, they have not thought about burner phones, and this has not gone through security review but the team doesn't think it has to."
████: "The authenticity piece seems really tricky — we can't enforce against impersonation/predators/press if we don't have a way to verify accounts."
████: "I totally agree- their relying on others reporting won't be effective if we can't evaluate authenticity. Someone could create a profile to snoop on teens, but never post anything themselves (or posts videos that don't reveal anything about them) and essentially remain anonymous."
████: "Based on your update, we now know they are rejecting the 'viral' strategy and instead just picking the 10 largest schools in NYC and Miami. So this will still beg the question of why we picked those schools and those cities. We can have good comms answers for those that will be fine. But it could raise an issue with the schools themselves- - so it begs the question again if we are doing any outreach to them beforehand. I know the PMM said we wouldn't, because that could tarnish the 'cool' factor for the studies if the administrators buy in. But the flip side of that is that we could have some angry public educators wondering what we're doing. This could also lead to some angry commentary directed at Mark, given that education is such a big part of what he cares about and that CZI is heavily invested in this. So they need to weigh all those risks."
Antigone Davis: "Thanks ████ for pushing this point. We have raised it a bunch of times and it hasn't seemed to resonate."
[2017 Top-Line Goal]:
• "Strategic goal: Time Spent Share"
— "What percent of all <= 18 smartphone + tablet time is an FB experience?"
• "Operational metric: Aggregate Total Time Spent"
— "eg. '15 billion minutes/day across FB Family'"
— "Built from MAP * DAP/MAP * TS/DAP"
"Our current results are despite FB choosing not to serve the U13 segment"
• "We have not built and launched any products to serve the significant social and entertainment needs of younger kids"
"For U13 kids, we should build Facebook One"
• "Goal: Grow MAP, DAP, and time spent among U13 kids"
"For U.S. teens, we should bet big on Instagram Direct + Stories to beat Snapchat"
• "Goal: Increase U.S. teen time spent"
"For U.S. Teens, we should focus Facebook on high school communal activities"
• "Goal: Grow MAP, DAP, and time spent among U.S. teens"
"In the United States, per-high school adoption is a crucial driver of teen Facebook engagement"
"High school network effects is likely a key determinant of teens' Facebook engagement"
• "'FB High Schools' (>75% adoption) have:"
— "15% higher avg L28"
— "22% more TS per MAP"
— "14% more NF TS per MAP"
— "81% more Post Sessions per MAP"
— "71% more OBPS per MAP"
— "69% more Comments per MAP"
— "94% more Wall Posts per MAP"
• "compared to high schools with 5-30% FB adoption"
"Our overall company goal is total teen time spent, which is MAP * MAP/DAP * TS/DAP."
"Mark has decided that the top priority for the company in H1 2017 is teens."
"Global PYMK: We believe that we can generate a bunch of new value by emphasizing teen:teen connections in PYMK. We are in active discussions with ████ about how to run H2 experiments to get some baselines. This is an area that can significantly change the content that teens see in feed, and their perception of the 'friendliness' of their overall FB experience."
"USA Classical growth tactics: We have emerging data science insights that Facebook usage in the US is doing great at 'Android High Schools' and terribly everywhere else... We believe that there's an opportunity to do classical FB growth on a high-school-by-high-school basis, figuring out second-order graph effects like public-private high school crossovers, athletic leagues, geographic proximity, etc. Instagram is less far along with their own geographic analysis, but we believe that IG is showing similar geographic effects, and there may be very useful partnership opportunities between teens, FB growth, and IG growth."
[Contents]: "H1 Plan: What we shared with Zuck Oct. 27"
[2017 Top-Line Goal]:
• "Strategic goal: Time Spent Share"
— "What percent of all <= 18 smartphone + tablet time is an FB experience?"
• "Operational metric: Aggregate Total Time Spent"
— "e.g. '15 billion minutes/day across FB Family'"
— "Built from MAP * DAP/MAP * TS/DAP"
"Our current results are despite FB choosing not to serve the U13 segment"
• "We have not built and launched any products to serve the significant social and entertainment needs of younger kids"
"For U.S. teens, we should bet big on Instagram Direct + Stories to beat Snapchat"
• "Goal: Increase U.S. teen time spent"
"For U.S. Teens, we should maximize high school communal activities within Facebook"
• "Goal: Grow MAP, DAP, and time spent among U.S. teens"
"For U13 kids, we should build Facebook One"
• "Goal: Grow MAP, DAP, and time spent among U13 kids"
Adam Mosseri: "The other open question is what does success look like for teens. It sounds like we care primarily about visitation, but that may not be the best metric to goal around. The question then becomes do we care primarily about time, which is where we're vectoring with India, or do we care about more than that (including things like sharing)."
████: "Our overall goal remains total teen time spent (MAP * DAP/MAP * TS/DAP), with some specific efforts (Instagram) taking on tighter focused goals like U.S. teen total time spent. We should set guardrails on social interaction (posting, commenting, liking) that keep us away from the failure mode of pure entertainment consumption vs. social entertainment."
Adam Mosseri: "Sorry I dropped this thread. On Strategy it sounds like you're proposing we focus, for those on Facebook, on time and only worry about sharing and comments as guardrails. I do think this is a pretty important thing to make sure everyone is on the same page about. I'm open to this, but I'd feel better about it if it looked like teens don't share on FB, but they do seem to share."
• "We should figure out whether pushing Facebook, Messenger and Instagram together to teens in the same areas is a good idea."
• "Building separate high school and/or messaging features inside Instagram might be more a more effective strategy to engage teens in Instagram-saturated areas."
• "We can track and experiment on a local network level to figure out if pushing features within Instagram is more effective than funneling teens from IG to FB/Messenger."
• "Engaging the vast majority of teens in an area / school with our products is crucial to driving overall time spent in the same area, especially for Messaging features."
[Our key hypotheses for teens and under 13s, 4]: "Pre-teens are under-served and fast-growing. We can build compelling social products for users as young as 5-10 and grow usage via their parents. Building for kids allows us to serve the social needs of future teens, help them establish their first social graph, and grow with them over time."
"What Winning Teens Looks Like — 2019 3-Year Goals"
• "A Facebook family app is the #1 teen social app in every market"
• "Facebook is the leader in social for U13 kids"
• "We have demonstrated that U13s successfully convert to FBF apps as teens"
[Our big 2017 bets, Under 13s, United States]: "Create fun, regulation-compliant visual messaging and platform sharing experiences for the enormous untapped segment of kids and parents."
"For U13 kids, we should build Identity & Messaging"
"Problem Statement: Under 13s are a large and fast-growing segment of smartphone and tablet users who are currently not served by any social product."
"Solution: Build a regulation-compliant messaging app for kids to connect with their friends and families."
• "Initial focus on ages 5-10 as the best kid segment to enthusiastically connect with parents"
• "Enable fun, visual & text communication with family & friends"
• "Enable parents to use FB Blue and Messenger to message, share video, and manage kid accounts and friending"
"Goal: Testing with 10,000 kids and parents, on track for Q3 public launch"
"18% of US teens are weekly active Finsta users, 9% of Global teens are weekly active Finsta users, and Finsta users share 3x as much content as non-Finsta users."
"Finsta Growth is an effort on the Growth team to encourage teens to create their first Finsta account and to teach them to use the multi-account switcher."
"Timeline of Instagram Usage: Teens typically join Instagram when they are in middle school at age 11-12, but it's not until they are in high school when they're obligated to accept invites from all peers that their follow count increases exponentially. Teens feel a great deal of social scrutiny on their first Instagram account and often delete most of their 'cringy' middle school photos."
[Timeline of Instagram Usage]:
• 11 yo, Middle School: "Start Main"
• 14 yo, High School: "Delete/Restart Main"
• 15 yo: "Start Finsta"
• 16 yo: "Start Finsta finsta"
"Mission: The Teens XFN helps make Instagram an integral part of what it means to be a teen; in everyday life, in entertainment, and in connecting with the world around them. We support Instagram's mission of strengthening human relationships by listening and providing global teens with the tools and resources they need to share their experiences with friends and fans."
[Our Four Team Goals]:
• "Bolster our product efforts by driving key launches for teens and arming them with teen insights. Tap into our advocate networks to build grassroots excitement for launches, and build an infrastructure for better data, feedback, and insights that will create a strong company position."
• "Accelerate Instagram's teen momentum in key verticals and with key partners: Drive momentum with Community Advocates and key partners while creating foundations for work with the following key groups -- tweens/parents and mobile-first video creators; LA-based partners; LA-based global teens."
• "Scale teen advocacy for everyday teens: Identify and support everyday and emerging teens who do not fall under the Partnerships umbrella (people without agents/up and comers)."
• "Make the teens outreach xfn one of the most productive, cohesive, and effective groups across Instagram: Continue to be the voice of teens throughout all levels of Instagram, advocating for teens and helping product teams better understand what teens value. Formalize team processes for better communication and collaboration. Share initiatives and collaborate with teams around Facebook to build synergies."
[Lookback: H2 2016 Highlights]:
• "TWEENS: Made huge inroads into this space.... Justin ████ what more would you say here? Previous bullet was this but that seems like a goal, not a lookback?: 'Tweens/"Managed by" accounts - From Nickelodeon to Disney to Musical.ly/Live.ly - Tweens are the future made massive outreach progress; double down on this!'"
[Lookback: H2 2016 Lowlights]:
• "COMPETITOR GROWTH + PROMINENCE: Snapchat huge marketing campaigns in LA including 1600 Vine; Musical.ly growing Tween follower base faster and landing big press stories as the 'kingmakers of the Tween'. Ongoing question of, 'Has IG peaked?'. Feedback that our app is just harder to use than others."
[H1 2017 What Does Success Look Like]:
• "Extremely close partnership with product and growth and FB to promote teen centric product amongst trendsetting real teens, top accounts and press"
• "Doubling down on our 2 superpowers of community and partnerships scale efforts with marketing and amplify with press"
• "Community Teen ambassadors using Instagram in a trendsetting ways that other normal teens replicate"
• "Top accounts continuing to tout in press how Instagram is 'family' and cares about their success"
• "IG native influencers making news and setting trends"
• "Teens seeing IG as a place for support and social good"
• "Partnerships focus in LA, Community focus in Blue Oceans in USA, Brazil and Europe, Press focus on National Stories"
• "US learnings scaled internationally"
[H1 Goals]:
• "Launch Masks and Live with successfully with major teen influencers"
• "Create a nationwide teen ambassador street team/IRL network. Set the foundations for this in EMEA as well."
• "Create 4 big teen events (amongst Kids Choice, Radio Disney Music Awards, Cochella, Vidcon)"
• "Identify and develop 1-2 native top accounts that we can say were birthed on Instagram."
• "Create 2 teens moments that show IG as a community of support or social good"
• "Start a sync with FB Teen teams (████ - With ████ to lead this role)"
• "Product, product lead on XFN and working together to achieve goals (████ to lead efforts)"
• "Scale US learnings internationally - 1 creator/community support event in Brazil and 1-2 in EU"
[Product Marketing, H2 2016 Highlights, Teen-focused product launches]:
• "Instagram Stories - 150M+ people use Instagram Stories every day (a daily participation rate of 40%), and we know teens are top users of stories. Teens are actually producing more Stories than Feed media on a global level"
• "Live and the new Direct - Executed a consumer launch plan focused on normal teens that helped drive teen adoption in test countries and the US. Early data shows that Instagram Live Stories has attracted a larger teen user base than Facebook Live."
[Product Marketing, H2 2016 Lowlights]:
• "No brand campaign to acquire teens"
• "Snapchat brand campaign at 1600 Vine"
████: "I feel like we should push for this managed by thing"
████: "Don't know how you feel"
Justin Antony: "Yes agreed. I also think we should look at a way to tweek the user experience by possibly adjusting feed/delivery, featuring, and redesigning the interface for teens to be more teen centric. Teens need to see other teens and tweens on the platform so that they feel the app is for a them. Right now they see too many adults on the platform but if they see more of themselves (ala musical.ly leaderboards) then it will be a better community for them"
Justin Antony: "Finstas everyone is saying is our way 'in' but I think we should more look at why teens use finstas. They use finstas because they see too many adults. so we need to find a way to keep adults off teen feed."
Sources include internal documents, public filings and press reports. “Alleged by plaintiffs” denotes the plaintiffs’ characterization, not Meta’s own words. Source labels identify provenance, not a finding of fact.
Meta & Children's Online Safety