Facebook Preps for First Earnings Report

A PR firm is helping the platform emphasize things other than strict financial number crunching.

Facebook's first earnings call is Thursday at 2 p.m. (Menlo Park time) and a pre-call blitz indicates that, to them, it's more about what they've been doing than how they've been selling it.

Highlighting things like acquiring Instagram and launching products will pull some of the focus away from the bottom line.

Having only been traded for about 90 days, how much bottom line are investors expecting to see? Sure, Facebook was stood up as a social networking system, but the stated goal is to become a common social platform for all sorts of internet consumption -- essentially a key in the internet lock, opening an entirely new experience.

It has been a big quarter for Facebook, even if it doesn't make investors swoon with huge revenue.

  • Buying Instagram (for $1 billion)
  • Settling the patent-infringement lawsuit with Yahoo
  • Buying $550 million worth of patents from Microsoft
  • Launching an app center
  • Facebook Exchange
  • Facebook Ads and sponsored symbiotic stories on Zynga

An analyst told CNET that Facebook "made a rash of acquisitions and [threw] itself into a lot of areas that it really won't be able to monetize in three months."

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