BusinessInsider: Social + Mobile = Smobile

Previously, Business Insider's BI Intelligence published a valuable report on US Internet trends. Recently, they released a report focusing on mobile and social networking, "Social and Mobile". The report came from the Social Media ROI Conference hosted by Business Insider on September 27, and the data and facts disclosed in it are very intriguing.

Mobile and social networking are unstoppable, but the commercialization process is a long way to go

• Last year, global smartphone sales surpassed PC sales. BI predicts that tablet sales will also surpass PC sales in the next few years.

• Traffic from mobile devices already accounts for 12% of the world's total traffic.
• As of March 2012, people were spending more than 120 billion minutes per month on mobile web pages and apps. A year earlier, that number was less than 60 billion minutes.
• Between 2011 and 2012, the smartphone ownership rate in the United States increased from 35% to 46%, feature phone ownership decreased from 48% to 41%, and the proportion of people without a mobile phone was 12%.
• In January 2012, data from Nielsen showed that smartphone penetration (popularity) was highest among young, high-income groups.

• In the United States, the share of "social" elements in mobile phone usage is constantly rising, among which the proportion of social network and blog usage has increased by 20%, approaching 40%.

• According to data from December 2011, people spent 94 minutes a day using apps and 72 minutes browsing mobile web pages.
• Among the apps people use, games and social networks account for the largest proportion. According to data from Flurry, in the first quarter of 2012, people spent 24 minutes on games and social network apps every day.
• Facebook has about 500 million mobile users (Note: the latest data shows that it has exceeded 600 million), more than half of Twitter's traffic comes from mobile devices, and the pure mobile application Instagram has exceeded 100 million users in two years.
• Communication is the most important need for people to use social networks on mobile devices, and they also like to take photos and receive information with their mobile phones.

• However, few people (32%) actually click on ads on mobile social networks, and the process of "monetization" on mobile devices still has a long way to go.
• The CPM on mobile is much lower than that on desktop ($3.5 vs. $0.75). Smartphone users are not interested in “obtrusive ads”. Smartphone ads have little effect. In short, mobile advertising revenue is still just the tip of the iceberg.

How reliable is mobile business?

How do businesses operate on mobile devices? There is a theory that as long as the location function of mobile phones is used to allow users to share their location through "check-in" or "permission", merchants can push coupons when users are close. However, this location-based coupon model has not been very effective. Only 36% of users will use the coupons provided by merchants.

Why? Because this is not the way people usually consume. Few consumers will walk into a store just for discounts. On the contrary, the things sold in the store need to be attractive enough, or they happen to be looking for the products you want to advertise at that time. Another idea of ​​"check-in" does not seem to become mainstream. According to the data, the proportion of people of all ages in the United States (18-29 years old, 30-49 years old and over 50 years old) using check-in services is less than 25%.

E-commerce has not received much help from social networks. The total traffic from Facebook and Twitter accounts for only 0.52% of the total traffic of e-commerce.

BusinessInsider believes that “native” mobile advertising is truly feasible, such as Sponsored Stories launched by Facebook on mobile and Promoted Tweets by Twitter. The two have one thing in common: they can be widely disseminated (highly sharable).

In addition, BI points out that situational recommendations (based on user hobbies, interests, and other attributes in addition to geographic location) are also a feasible model. In this model, merchants push information with the user's permission, and such information should be infrequent and highly relevant to the user. In addition, this model is more suitable for merchants who provide services, and such services can guide users to consume directly on smartphones.

The three leading horses and potential winners

• Facebook: More than 500 million mobile users and “unrivaled” mobile user engagement; but lacks effective location data; acquisitions of companies such as Instagram and Glancee may help.
• Twitter: More than 60% of its traffic comes from mobile devices. Its products and advertising platforms are very "mobile", and users' Tweets reveal a lot of information.
• Google: It has a very good asset portfolio, is the world leader in advertising relevance, and has the most popular mobile properties and services; but it has a huge disadvantage in social network data.

When it comes to who is likely to get the "key to victory," the report lists Foursquare, Pinterest, Groupon, LivingSocial, Apple, Microsoft and startups such as Path.

via: ifanr