SAN FRAN­CIS­CO-Face­book Inc chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer Mark Zucker­berg might need to talk more of­ten. A 30-minute ap­pear­ance at a tech­nol­o­gy in­dus­try con­fer­ence ear­li­er this week has trans­lat­ed in­to US$6.785 bil­lion in ad­di­tion­al mar­ket val­u­a­tion for his com­pa­ny.

Face­book shares fin­ished Fri­day's reg­u­lar trad­ing ses­sion up 6.2 per cent at US$22 as Wall Street's con­fi­dence in the com­pa­ny con­tin­ued to im­prove in the wake of the 28-year-old CEO's first pub­lic ap­pear­ance since a rocky ini­tial pub­lic of­fer­ing in May. The so­cial net­work­ing com­pa­ny's progress in­tro­duc­ing a new ad­ver­tis­ing ser­vice that gives mar­keters im­proved ways to reach con­sumers on Face­book al­so helped bol­ster its shares, an­a­lysts said.

Zucker­berg's com­ments, in which he high­light­ed mo­bile busi­ness progress, sug­gest­ed Face­book could en­ter the search mar­ket and ex­pressed con­fi­dence in fu­ture mon­ey-mak­ing prospects, have im­proved the per­cep­tion of the stock. Zucker­berg has a rep­u­ta­tion for spend­ing his time build­ing the com­pa­ny from the in­side rather than go­ing around pro­mot­ing it to in­vestors.

Reuters