What did U.K. mobile users with Internet access do in December? About half the time they actually were using their mobile Internet access, they were going to Facebook, according to new data from the GSM Association. And that was just one of the social networking sites. In all likelihood, when all social sites are added up, they amount to a clear majority of the places mobile users were going.
Separately, a study by GroundTruth shows that more than 60 percent of U.S. mobile Web page views are to social networking sites.
What does that mean for mobile marketers? Social networking increasingly has become a mobile activity. So marketing aimed at social networking users, whether intended or not, is inherently mobile.
In fact, it might be said that the reason people use the mobile Internet is to keep in contact with their friends, family and associates, as well as make new friends. A mobile device is, after all, a communications device.
That is one primary way mobile use of the Internet and Web resources is different from fixed, desktop modes. In using social media so much, users are in some ways returning to the original “killer app” for the old dial-up Internet. It was email that drove desire for Internet access. It is social networking that drives demand for mobile Web access.
It is not the only reason, but it is the “killer app,” to the extent there is one.
If, as analysts at Gartner now predict, online marketing by 2015 will control more than $ 250 billion in Internet marketing spending worldwide, that spending will be shaped by social and mobile behavior.
In fact, at a broader level, “online” means “mobile.” By 2014, mobile and Internet technology will help over three billion of the world’s adults to electronically transact, Gartner says.
In fact, worldwide mobile penetration rate will get to 90 percent. By 2013, mobile phones will replace PCs as the most common device for Web access.
All of this has implications for marketing creative material, placement and purpose. Increasingly, effective campaigns will centrally be designed for a mobile user using a small-screen device, out and about and very engaged in keeping up with what friends and associates are doing. To the extent that “search” remains a key Internet activity, people will be searching for different things.
Mobile marketing will not be all of online or Web marketing; just the majority of it.
