Morgan Stanley Comments On Facebook's New Features, Sees It As 'Winner' In Mobile Adverstising

Morgan Stanley commented on Facebook Inc’s FB new functions on Tuesday.

Analyst led by Benjamin Swinburne noted that “New functions (Search and Trending) [were] added to the mobile consumer product and Calls to Action features for Facebook Pages (for businesses).

“Facebook also made improvements to their Graph Search, now allowing keyword searches to find specific posts (“[friend name] wedding”) in addition to the original Graph Search phrases ("Friends who live in New York").”

Swinburne did not think “that FB can meaningfully impact Google’s search share, despite FB’s improvements to search. In the near term, we believe Facebook is the winner in the shift to mobile display (brand) advertising, where it can leverage features such as Trending to push high-quality, contextualized ad content to users, and Calls to Action for businesses to bring consumers closer to the conversion.”

“Facebook is building out its platform to expand beyond just social content, as we recently saw Facebook release a verticalized news platform that features only Tech news (Techwire) to supplement their Newswire. Trending is a natural addition, in our view, and the breakout of sources will prevent a user’s news feed from cluttering,” according to the analyst note.

Swinburne believed that “Facebook is the winner in the shift to mobile display (brand) advertising, where it can leverage features such as Trending to push high-quality, contextualized ad content to users, similar to how Twitter leverages big events like the World Cup.”

Facebook Inc recently traded at $81.36, down 0.11 percent.