Salesforce's Scott Dorsey, MillerCoors Andy England, Facebook's Carolyn Everson and Ford's James Farley speak at a CES keynote titled "Brand Matters" on Wednesday in Las Vegas.
Salesforce’s Scott Dorsey, MillerCoors Andy England, Facebook’s Carolyn Everson and Ford’s James Farley speak at a CES keynote titled “Brand Matters” on Wednesday in Las Vegas.

LAS VEGAS — Facebook’s mobile initiatives have recently been helping to fuel the company’s business, but it wasn’t always that way, as demonstrated by the widespread concerns about Facebook’s mobile strategy in the social network’s early days as a public company.

As it turns out, “mobile is the best thing that happened to our business,” said Carolyn Everson, Facebook vice president of global marketing solutions, during a CES keynote panel today.

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“We were not a mobile-first company,” Everson said, pointing out that Mark Zuckerberg founded the company in his Harvard dorm room from a desktop computer.

Everson recounted how Zuckerberg fundamentally changed the company in 2011 to focus on its mobile products, retraining every engineer and rebuilding all its apps, which were notorious for their inefficiencies and customer complaints.

“When Mark re-pivoted the company and made it very clear that our entire future was going to be based on mobile, the psychology inside our company changed practically overnight,” she said.

At the time, Facebook didn’t quite realize how much impact that pivot was going to have from a marketing standpoint, she said. By giving advertisers access to mobile News Feeds, it created a valuable and lucrative new platform for the social network.

The numbers tell the story: Roughly 49 percent of Facebook’s third quarter advertising revenue last year came from the company’s mobile properties, and 48 percent of users are accessing the social network solely from their tablets and phones.

Everson said she doesn’t see the mobile growth stopping anytime soon.

“It’s the most important thing we’ll see in our lifetime as marketers,” she said. “As excited as we are about 3D printing, wearable devices and all the other great things on the CES floor, the mega point is that there are more mobile phones than there are toothbrushes in the world. We are going to see an entirely different global community that will be connected, not through desktop, but only through mobile devices. That, for me, is the story for many more years to come.”

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