Facebook is now a mobile brand

 

Up 57% last quarter facebook now has 680 million users accessing the brand on mobile compared with 380 million on desktop.

Zuckerberg himself says that “facebook is now a mobile company”.

With this change comes the facebook commitment to ensure that “mobile first experiences” are content savvy and satisfying ensuring that this trend will only keep growing. What does this mean for digital brands and digital marketing?

For mobile.

More fuel to the fire that mobile is becoming the communications tool of today’s marketer. Without marketing as part of your marketing mix you are increasingly missing out on billions of people and an ever increasing amount of their spare time.

For other mobile orientated brands.

With the power of hundreds of millions of users transferring to mobile from desktop or just bypassing desktop altogether this means there will be more customers accessing other aps and mobile sites of other brands at the same time as they are accessing facebook on mobile. This is a golden opportunity for mobile to generate an even greater share of the digital marketing budgets.

For personal computers.

Is this the end? The trend is that mobile users are growing twice as fast as those on pc to access facebook. Mobile is also cannibalising PC users as well as creating new users.

For digital advertising.

23% of all facebook advertising revenues now come from mobile. Up from 14% and the trend is clearly growing to become a majority. With a majority of users now accessing facebook on mobile the money must flow this way too.

For digital marketing.

The big USP that mobile has over PC is location based marketing. Unlike PC’s mobile can do so much more for a brand to target a consumer. Location based marketing is one of the main areas that brands should be exploiting with this massive surge in those that are accessing mobile for facebook and the knock on effect that this has for other brands. Once they are used to accessing brands on mobile people will not be going back to PC. They will only be going forwards by spending more time and accessing more brands on mobile.

The ability to target consumers whether by push message through an app, sms or advertising purely on a location basis transforms the digital marketing industry. The industry becomes one that was not targeting people correctly to one that can minimise wastage and target people with location based offers and brands within an area. This enables truly cost effective targeted marketing.

Great examples of this are food and drink outlets who can target consumers at certain times of the day and night in some certain areas or retail brands who can do the same once they know someone is in the area of their store. Leisure and entertainment attractions would be next to benefit by this. If a mall owner can keep a consumer consuming in their mall by targeting that person with offers and added value then they keep more of the shopping and F&B pie for themselves and cut their competitors margin in the process.

For creative digital marketing the opportunities increase to create specific mobile creative and not just digital creative. They are two very different mediums. You wouldn’t create the same advert for a tabloid as for a broadsheet so why do brands think the same applies for smart phones versus lap tops versus tablets?

Mobile marketing creative is often criticised for poor execution. The shift of budgets to mobile through power brands like facebook means that there is a great opportunity here for more money to be invested in mobile creative to allow brands to capitalise on these new and growing users.

The time has come for brands to stand up and exploit these changing times for their benefit.