{"id":22226,"date":"2012-09-15T01:25:01","date_gmt":"2012-09-14T23:25:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=22226"},"modified":"2012-09-17T10:00:28","modified_gmt":"2012-09-17T08:00:28","slug":"facebook-shares-up-after-zuckerberg-pep-talk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/internet\/22226\/facebook-shares-up-after-zuckerberg-pep-talk\/","title":{"rendered":"Facebook shares up after Zuckerberg pep talk"},"content":{"rendered":"

Facebook Inc<\/a> CEO Mark Zuckerberg<\/a> might need to talk more often. A 30-minute appearance at a technology industry conference earlier this week has translated into $6.785 billion in additional market valuation for his company.<\/p>\n

Facebook shares finished Friday’s regular trading session up 6.2 percent at $22 as Wall Street’s confidence in the company continued to improve in the wake of the 28-year-old CEO’s first public appearance since a rocky initial public offering in May.<\/p>\n

The social networking company’s progress introducing a new advertising service that gives marketers improved ways to reach consumers on Facebook also helped bolster its shares, analysts said.<\/p>\n

“People are starting to feel a little more comfortable,” said Arvind Bhatia, an analyst with Sterne, Agee & Leach<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Zuckerberg’s comments, in which he highlighted mobile business progress, suggested Facebook could enter the search market and expressed confidence in future money-making prospects, have improved the perception of the stock, said Bhatia.<\/p>\n

Zuckerberg has a reputation for spending his time building the company from the inside rather than going around promoting it to investors.<\/p>\n

On Thursday, Facebook said its nascent ad exchange was no longer in testing mode, and several advertising agencies reported encouraging early results using the service.<\/p>\n

The Facebook Ad Exchange allows marketers to target consumers with pitches based on their past Web browsing activity, such as the websites they’ve visited — a standard online advertising technique that until now has not been available on Facebook.<\/p>\n

The ad exchange hints at improved monetization potential for Facebook, said Lazard Capital Markets analyst William Bird.<\/p>\n

The world’s No.1 online social network with 955 million users, Facebook has faced a rough debut since its May initial public offering. Investors and analysts have fretted about a sharp slowdown in its revenue growth. Shares of Facebook remain well below their $38 offering price.<\/p>\n

The ongoing expiration of “lock-up” restrictions on Facebook insiders selling shares have added further pressure on the stock.<\/p>\n

“I don’t think they’re completely out of the woods, but it does feel like the sentiment is improving,” said Sterne, Agee & Leach’s Bhatia.<\/p>\n

The shares are up roughly 13 percent since Zuckerberg spoke at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco on Tuesday.<\/p>\n

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New Nasdaq Facebook compensation plan liked<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Nasdaq Facebook compensation plan slammed<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Facebook sinks to record low<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Facebook Inc CEO Mark Zuckerberg might need to talk more often. A 30-minute appearance at a technology industry conference earlier this week has translated into $6.785 billion in additional market valuation for his company.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":17122,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9882],"tags":[25,151,45,1244,173],"class_list":["post-22226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-internet","tag-active","tag-ceo","tag-facebook","tag-mark-zuckerberg","tag-shares"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22226"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22226\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22274,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22226\/revisions\/22274"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}