Nicola Mendelsohn, vice president for Facebook in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, said video content on Facebook was growing more quickly than the company ever anticipated.
When asked at Fortune's Most Powerful Women International Summit in London where Facebook would be in a half-decade in terms of mobile and video, Mendelsohn said: "We're seeing a year-on-year decline of text … If I was having a bet, I'd say: video, video, video."
A writer for Quartz asked Mendelsohn whether Facebook was pushing video over text. Facebook's algorithm currently favors native video and live video posts over plain text updates. But Mendelsohn said the shift was user-driven and organic.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has previously spoken about how important video is to Facebook, but Mendelsohn went a step further, as she all but predicted the end of the written word on Facebook.
On the shift toward video, Mendelsohn said: "The best way to tell stories in this world — where so much information is coming at us — actually is video. It commands so much information in a much quicker period so actually the trend helps us digest more of the information in a quicker way."
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Mendelsohn, who has built her career in the advertising and marketing industries, used a series of figures to back up her argument. Facebook's daily video views have gone from 1 billion to 8 billion over the course of a year. Text posts, meanwhile, are declining year-on-year, she said.
Facebook users watch an average of 100 million hours of video on mobile every day, added Mendelsohn, who oversees 433 million Facebook users in the EMEA region.
The social network's new live video feature is also "a bigger, faster phenomenon" than Facebook expected, Mendelsohn said. Live videos receive 10 times as many comments as prerecorded videos, Mendelsohn said, adding that "engagement is much higher."
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