It's time to mobilize your social fans

With Cyber Monday in the rear view mirror, here are some thoughts on the importance of capturing the mobile follower. Since joining Friend2Friend, we have ensured that every social branded experience is fully mobile-ready.  It's been great to put all that Loopt experience to work!

Read the recent article at Direct Marketing News:http://www.dmnews.com/its-time-to-mobilize-your-social-fans/article/273864/

Social mobile is exploding

Every key indicator worth watching shows that the mobile Internet is exploding. The market has now finally reached a point where smartphone and tablet usage, and accompanying Internet speed and application performance, are such that users actually find their phones — and tablets — legitimate and worthwhile alternatives to their desktop or laptop computer. This, combined with critical audience size, opens up an enormous untapped market for brands to engage social mobile fans.

See this post just posted to Friend2Friend's blog with some of the latest stats pointing to the explosion of social mobile. 

Are you failing your Facebook fans on mobile?

Last year, Forrester predicted that U.S. brands will spend $2.7B on their social media marketing efforts by the end of 2013, with that number growing to $5B by 2016. And with one in five of all Internet clicks in the U.S. happening on Facebook, brands are taking the cultivation and engagement of their fan base on Facebook seriously.

But unless brands wake up to their Facebook “mobile problem,” they will waste significant marketing dollars as well as audience clicks. The mobile problem I’m talking about is, surprisingly, unrelated to Facebook mobile advertising.

And it’s an issue that has yet to be widely discussed. Brands have been quietly struggling to engage with their Facebook fans who connect with them from a mobile device. We recently conducted a field review that illustrated that Facebook promotional apps on seven of the top ten most popular brand fan pages failed to successfully engage mobile fans.

See the article written for Friend2Friend and successfully placed at MediaPost on this critical subject.

How top brands are failing their fans on Facebook mobile

Not that it’s should come as any surprise, but this past Cyber Monday’s sales generated by mobile phone visitors jumped by 260% since 2010 — more than 6x the growth of sales overall. The same study by Deloitte tells us to expect that 68% of smartphone owners will be using their handheld devices for holiday shopping this year. In a separate study released in September 2012 we are told that those mobile consumers will not like visiting a poorly designed mobile experience on their smartphone.

Google tells us that mobile-friendly web experiences drive sales, and that while 75% of users prefer a mobile-friendly Website, 96% say they’ve encountered sites that were clearly not designed for mobile devices. So it’s clear then. You cannot ignore the mobile component of your marketing plan.

But what should you be thinking about, particularly with regard to the social component of your campaigns, when it comes to mobile? How do you approach mobile Facebook fans? Facebook users are accessing the site through their mobile devices in ever increasing numbers. In October of this year, Facebook announced they had 604 million monthly active users (MAUs) — an increase of 61% year over year. This compared to a 26% YoY for MAUs overall.

Where I work at Friend2Friend, an analysis of our clients’ branded Apps and Facebook Pages through 2012 has seen a significant increase in mobile activity. An average of 11% of all traffic to our branded mobile-enabled Facebook Apps now come from smartphones, a trend that has grown by 450% since January of 2012.

In addition, we have seen a tremendous growth in mobile likes for our clients on Facebook, with 350% more likes coming from mobile since January 2012.

Read this blog post for a study I performed of top brands and how they performed with mobile campaigns on Facebook.