Hoping to address industry murmurs that Facebook, like its social media competitor Twitter, is struggling to evolve and remain relevant, Mark Zuckerberg has leaked the company’s plans to not only remain relevant but expand the world’s most popular social media service over the next decade. In short, Facebook wants to move away from being only the hub of social media activity on its core site and instead begin to rely more on an umbrella of standalone applications. In short, as Business Insider’s Steven Tweedie put it, Zuckerberg wants the social media behemoth to be the “Coca-Cola” of the online world.

We’ve already seen Facebook begin to lay the groundwork for its 10-year plan. In the first quarter of 2014, the company spent over $20 billion to acquire experimental augmented reality firm Oculus Rift, social messaging service WhatsApp, and a number of other services. The company is making no secret of its willingness, intention even, to buy other services that fill a niche market that Facebook has yet to touch. In doing so, the tech giant will build itself as a load bearing beam in the infrastructure of the web, ensuring its relevancy for a long time to come.

Marketing No Longer Enough for Long Term Viability
Facebook’s continued relevancy has been called into question over the last six months. At the end of 2013, it was revealed that Facebook likes, shares, and comments, long touted as a driver of search engine optimization success, offer little to no bearing on the placement of businesses in Google search engine results. Next came cries of incompetence as the company continued to spend exorbitant amounts of money on WhatsApp and other services, only to ostensibly not do a thing with them. Despite the fact that the company is known to have generated new customers for 77% of B2B businesses and 43% of B2C businesses, ever worsening industry sentiment about the proverbial burning of Rome was taken as a sure sign that it was time to change things up. Zuckerberg’s ambitious plan for his tech company should be seen as a definite sign that Facebook is ready to do just that.

“I think as future generations change the way they communicate, we will begin to see different marketing trends emerging. I think the future really holds a lot of exciting marketing opportunities, and I don’t think we’ve yet hit the peak of that excitement to date.” state Marcy Moore at MorePro Marketing.