By now everyone should understand the importance of all things mobile. Yesterday at the annual WOMMA Summit, Terry City from BuzzFeed said the following that quickly garnered lots of Twitter love: “If it doesn’t work on mobile, it doesn’t work.” And with every new smartphone sold this becomes increasingly right on.
(Image courtesy of WOMMA Summit)
The shift to social media being consumed on mobile devices is very real. But many brands’ existing strategies are based on the wrong assumption that social is still a desktop/laptop thing. Do people still use desktops and laptops for social networking? Of course they do. It’s just that social media usage is rising and it’s being driven by the proliferation of smartphone adoption.
And it is not just social activities; mobile is driving changes across many behaviors from shopping to service to search.
Comscore says we in the U.S. spend 52% of our “digital time” on mobile apps. Mobile comprises 60% of digital media usage…a percentage that’s rising at a rapid clip. Social, along with games and music, dominate mobile app usage, with Facebook the clear #1 for audience size and time spent.
When you drill down to how the individual social networks are predominantly engaged, 98% of the time U.S. users spend with Instagram is on mobile. For Pinterest it’s 92%, Twitter 86%, and Facebook 68%. So taking these kinds of statistics into consideration, an aware social marketer would have no choice but to start thinking about social solely in terms of how it plays out for users on mobile.
Brands and advertisers start doing damage to their company when they don’t stay in step with real changes in consumer behavior.
And here’s what that behavior looks like: There are more people in this world that own smartphones than own toothbrushes. Four out of five consumers use smartphones to shop. 52% of Americans use mobile for in-store research. 70% of mobile searches lead to online action within an hour. People that find you on mobile convert at almost 3x the rate as those that find you on desktop/laptop. Those using mobile are out and about, living their lives and ready to socially engage.
Smartphones aren’t just lighter laptops. They are enabled with innovative and valuable opportunities—think sensors, beacons, location-based recognition. They can bring hyper-local targeting, personalization and context marketing to life.
Mary Meeker’s State of the Internet report brought us some curious figures that illustrate a disconnect between where the public is spending their media time, and how much ad spend goes there. For instance, print usage is at 5% and dropping, yet the spend by advertisers comfortably jogging behind consumer behavior is 19%.
Looking at overall mobile ad market trends, however, things look like they’re heading in a reasonably right direction. BI Intelligence says it will grow the fastest amongst digital options, going over $32.6 billion in 2018 with social leading the way. eMarketer thinks mobile ad spend will surpass desktop PC advertising by 2016, then TV advertising by 2018, with Facebook controlling at least 71% of the mobile ad market.
Today
businesses need a strategic social paid, owned and earned strategy – and it
needs to be a mobile-first strategy. Do you forget about desktop/laptop usage?
Of course not, you are still reaching and engaging there, but it’s dwindling. Mobile
must take priority. The relationships
you’re building with your customers on social, using the data they’re handing you via
social +
other enterprise data, with content served up at a time and place of convenience
and high relevance, targeted and amplified with mobile ad options, is the
increasingly obvious path to pursue.