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Facebook’s earnings surge 52% based on strong mobile advertising performance

For the full year 2015, Facebook said its revenue came in at $17.93 billion which is 44 percent rise year-over-year.

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Facebook has just posted its earning results for the quarter and the year, and the standout bits are that it smashed financial records and has on average 1.04 billion daily active users – most of which log on from mobile devices.

Facebook knows how to win friendsThe company ended the quarter with 1.59 billion monthly users, a 14% annual increase.

Q4 also saw Facebook closing in on 1bn daily active users on mobile, with the figure growing from 894m in Q3 to 934m, an increase of 4.4 per cent despite the relative maturity of the company’s offering.

It marked the first time that Facebook’s quarterly revenue has surpassed $5 billion – more than fading Internet star Yahoo now generates in an entire year.

Sandberg and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg did drop one nugget on Instagram in Wednesday’s conference call, revealing that 98 out of Facebook’s 100 top advertisers also advertised on Instagram in the fourth quarter. Apart from focusing on mobile, Facebook has been investing in other areas such as virtual reality, artificial intelligence and drones to connect the remotest parts of the world to the Internet.

What: Shares of social networker Facebook have soared today, up by 15% as of 12:20 p.m. ET, after the company reported strong fourth-quarter earnings.

People are still very fond of Facebook.

The company also said that 80% of its advertising revenue in that period came from mobile advertising, up from 69% a year earlier.

In comparison, struggling rival Twitter has around 320 million monthly users.

That’s still a lot of ground for Facebook to make up, but it’s not impossible, given the digital dossiers that it has compiled about its users’ passions, friendships and other services that they visit while signed into the social-networking service.

Facebook’s stock rose 7.5 per cent in after-hours trading as a result of the earnings numbers. Still, in its fourth quarter, Facebook made more than $1 billion in profit and $5.8 billion in revenue.

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Industry expert and founder of consumer technology website Pocket-lint, Stuart Miles, suggested that Facebook was benefiting from embracing the smartphone and tablet and the latest results meant the company could afford to try new things in the coming years.

Facebook began testing the'reactions options in Spain and Ireland in October 2015