At our final Mix N’ Mentor of the year in Dubai earlier this month we took some time to talk to the mentors about their particular areas of expertise. In this video Wamda spoke with Jonathan Labin, Head of Middle East at Facebook. 

“It is tougher and tougher for any brand to stand out with consumers today,” says Labin. While it is common that standing out on Facebook is a struggle, Labin’s top two pieces of advice for brands are: strong content and relevance [for consumers].

On the other hand, despite being a global tool, Facebook’s ability to work on a local level is key to seeing them directly serve brands in the region. “The content shared on Facebook is very local, coming from friends, family and communities, which makes us a global tool that works great locally,” Labin explains. And it also works the other way - a few months ago Facebook rolled out their ‘expats targeting tool’, “the idea came from the region and for the region, but is now being used globally,” he told us.

When it comes to attracting Facebook’s attention, Labin says that there is no steadfast recipe. “We try to understand the ecosystem, though it is moving very fast. We’ve learned ourselves at the Facebook platform that the world moved quickly from being all about the web, to becoming all about mobile, to now being about mobile applications. This is where our focus is, as we think this is where the future lies.”