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Facebook?s Spool deal suggests stronger content play

Facebook?s acquisition of social mobile bookmarking service Spool is part of the company's latest move to build a stronger mobile presence.

While Facebook has made several acquisitions this year intended to boost its mobile presence, the latest deal could lay the groundwork for content creation and distribution services in addition to its existing discovery and sharing services. Since going public last month, Facebook has been under significant pressure to monetize its mobile business and a stronger content strategy could be one way of doing just that.

?This is a group that was building mobile content experiences, taking mobile and connecting it to all other platform experiences but really starting with mobile and mobile content consumption,? Jed Williams, analyst and program director at BIA/Kelsey, Chantilly, VA.

?This shows that Facebook is thinking very acutely about how it improves its overall app, especially in terms of different types of content,? he said.

?Of all the different revenue sources that Facebook can open up that are not advertising based, content is a big one.?

Content consumption
The deal for Spool is all about Facebook wanting to make it easy to consume content across a multitude of platforms, a goal it is not alone in pursuing.

A lot of companies are working on creating engaging mobile experiences around content consumption that can translate across platforms seamlessly.

For example, the quickly growing Evernote app lets users save notes, audio and images while they are on the goal and retrieve the content wherever they want.

?As consumers go from using mobile devices throughout their day to a desktop while at work and maybe a tablet at home, how do we unify that all together?,? Mr. Williams said.

?Understanding that the consumer is using multiple platforms, how do you optimize by platform ? this is what Spool is getting at,? he said.

?When it happens automatically, it creates an ease for the consumer ? you can save once and it is available however and wherever you want to consume it.?

What made the Spool team attractive to Facebook is the technology behind the app enabling users to store Web content such as videos that can be accessed later from a variety of devices.

In a post on its company blog over the weekend, Spool revealed that its team will be joining Facebook. The company?s social mobile bookmarking service is being shut down.

?We started Spool to make content easy to consume on a mobile device,? said Avichal Garg, one of the company?s co-founders, in the blog post. ?To accomplish this, we built some very sophisticated technology and developed a deep expertise in mobile software development.

?We firmly believe that solving these problems will be increasingly important as the world accesses the Internet primarily through mobile devices,? he said.

Better experiences
Facebook is under pressure to find ways to bring in revenue from its mobile platform. While the company has released mobile advertising solutions as one way to monetize mobile, a strong content strategy could be another way for the company to drive revenue from mobile.

While to date, Facebook has focused on enabling users to discover and share content they are consuming elsewhere, the Spool deal could lay the groundwork for Facebook to be more active participant in the creation and distribution of content.

?Content is essential if you want to bring people to your site and keep them there,? Mr. Williams said. ?There has to be a value proposition and that really starts with content.?

?How much of that content will Facebook try to bring directly within its walls to become a central repository for consuming news and reading books?,? he said. ?How much won?t be about sharing but finding and consuming within the network.

?Acquisitions like this make use think harder not only about how to optimize content but what that content may actually be.?

For Facebook, the Spool team should be able help it continue to improve its own mobile apps. These apps are playing an increasingly important role for Facebook as users increasingly access the social network via their mobile devices as opposed to on a desktop or laptop computer.

The need to improve the app experience is one of the reasons why Facebook acquired photo-sharing app Instagram for $1 billion several months ago.

?Facebook has acknowledged that it has to continually iterate on the app experience,? Mr. Williams said. ?That doesn?t mean the app experience is bad, but if Facebook is going to monetize in mobile, it has to grow that user base and it has to continually improve that mobile app experience.

?For Facebook, it is still early days but acquisitions like this make us think long and hard about what Facebook?s role in content may look like.?

Final Take
Chantal Tode is associate editor on Mobile Marketer, New York