Mobile Usage Trends on Social Media

Mobile traffic is growing rapidly and marketers need to learn how to adjust brand content to this trend. Mobile marketing and its related strategies, such as location-based marketing, have gained traction. BI Intelligence found that 91% of companies plan to increase their investments in location-based marketing.

At Renegade, we want to know how significant the growing mobile usage is on social media as it relates to brands. We looked at four brands from different industries on Facebook and compared the percentage of Likes gained from mobile users on a daily basis over a seven-month period.

The combined daily average percentage trend varied in the internet, telecom, travel, and food/nutrition industries. However, there was a 6.42% increase in mobile Likes overall. More notable is that the low points of the likes in the last three months for every industry are higher than the first three months. This indicates that it’s not just the spike driving the increasing trend, but the concentration of mobile activity overall.

Looking at the industries individually, the study showed the food/nutrition brand had an average of 18% mobile Likes, except a slight lapse in October. The Internet brand grew its mobile Likes to 5% in the New Year. The telecom brand’s mobile Likes increased in October for two months, similar to the travel brand’s significant growth, which is attributed to the holiday season.

These findings correspond to Forbes’ industry prediction that “Mobile is the future of everything.” According to Forbes, mobile is replacing desktop consumption overall, and you can expect to see continued growth in social media engagement.

Tips for building a mobile brand

As mobile becomes an increasingly important part of marketing in 2014, brands should take steps to improve their mobile performance.

• Adapt your website to have a responsive design to provide a streamline viewer experience on smartphones and tablets.
• Consider how you construct your content to make it easier to read and navigate by optimizing font size, buttons, and video length.
• A mobile app is also an option but keep in mind the investment an app requires versus mobile-optimized online content.

Your brand needs to go where the audiences are across all channels. Now go mobile!

Methodology: With data from Facebook Insights, daily page likes gained from mobile, mobile ads, mobile page browser, mobile page browser invite, and mobile page suggestions were combined as mobile likes. These mobile likes were compared to the total likes on daily and monthly bases. Data was collected from July 1, 2013 to January 31, 2014.