Over the last 12 month Facebook has bolstered its presence in mobile, underlined by its recent acquisitions of photo sharing application providers Instagram and Lightbox, and real time messaging company Beluga.

Furthermore, given Facebook’s rapidly increasing scale and growing use on mobile, the role of Facebook in over-the-top (OTT) messaging should not be ignored by mobile operators, despite the hype around smaller "independent" services such as WhatsApp. WhatsApp has been credited for the demise of KPN’s mobile messaging revenue in the Netherlands.

In our recently published report “Facebook and Messaging: Threat or Opportunity” we address key questions, such as:

• Does Facebook Messenger, along with the core messaging and communication features of the main Facebook app and website, represent a considerable threat to carrier messaging?
• What is Facebook’s scale?
• How is it used by consumers?
• What rich features can carriers, OEMs and others learn from?
• And what’s next for the seemingly ubiquitous and unstoppable social network?

The report also highlights a number of offensive and defensive response strategies for operators in order to combat the growing threat of Facebook, including wholesale partnerships through to evolving carrier messaging services in order to compete.