We have all heard that everyone is moving to mobile. Everything is going mobile: mobile payments, everything in the cloud, and rich media. More than ever, people will access the internet through a smart phone. Morgan Stanley Research estimates sales of smart phones will exceed those of PCs in 2012. Gartner expect over 500 million smart phones to sell in 2012. Whether the analysts are precisely on target is not the point. One thing is certain: The number of consumers using smart phones will increase and so will their reliance on using apps and ads to enrich their user experience. Read more about the trends in mobile marketing.
We have also heard that a mobile phone is constantly used by its owner to access the internet and social sites. Mobile social networking is surging! So it’s not surprising at all to learn that a majority of mobile users are spending vast amounts of time accessing their social media. According to comScore MobiLens, 55% of all Twitter traffic and 45% of all Facebook traffic is from mobile users. Data from comScore also predicts that smart phones will play an even larger role in people’s lives. 64 million smart phone owners accessed their social sites and this number is up 77% from December 2010. It is not only that smart phone users are accessing their social sites; more than one half are doing so on a daily basis, and these numbers are likely to increase.
Direct traffic from mobile users’ social profiles has enormous potential to change how businesses and brands will market via mobile. Add knowing the location of mobile users to the mix of knowing consumers’ social profiles, and you then have an incredible predictor of knowing what consumers will want to do when they get to their destination. Marketers will be served-up information about consumers’ age, education, occupation, likes, social habits, opinions and other people in their social network. We are arriving at a place and time when mobile apps and mobile ads will achieve unprecedented growth due to the sheer increase in smart phone users and the intelligence that is being given to marketers. –Kalin.
