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Image Source: Mashable

If you’re a reader of the Wall Street Journal you may have heard a little bit about Facebook’s mobile miscalculation. The discussion centers mostly around the fact that although the number of people accessing Facebook with their smartphones and tablets is exploding, a number of Facebook’s apps (most notably games) can’t be accessed on Facebook’s mobile site. Since Facebook takes a 30% cut of game sales when players buy virtual goods on the site, less access means less opportunity to generate revenue.

The good news is that, unless you work for Facebook or a game development company like CrowdStar or Zynga, Facebook’s mobile miscalculation probably isn’t going to affect your bottom-line. The bad news is, in the year of the tablet, there’s a good chance your company has had a mobile miscalculation or two of your own. That miscalculation might be not having a mobile version of your website, but it could also be neglecting already existing opportunities to connect with your target audience using platforms such as social media.

Mobile + Social = 2012′s Critical Marketing Combination

If you read WSJ’s latest piece about Facebook, you already know that more than half of Facebook’s 900 million users access this social network using a mobile device. And if you think Facebook is the only social network people are accessing on their mobile device, you’re just kidding yourself.

• 54% of Twitter users access this social network using their mobile phone (Source: Pew)
• Every second, 41 LinkedIn profiles are viewed using a mobile device (Source: LinkedIn)
• YouTube accounts for as much as 25% of mobile network traffic (Source: Sandvine)

In fact, YouTube Mobile (m.youtube.com) is the #2 video-viewing website in the world, second only to YouTube.com. According to YouTube, viewers watch more than 400 million videos from mobile devices every day and half of smartphone users watch video from their devices (stat reported in Sept. 2011).

Want proof? Just check the traffic from your favorite YouTube video and see how many instances of “First view from a mobile device” you can find.

This example comes a YouTube “Hauler” (review) video that was posted for a BLASTmedia client’s product on May 16th. According to the publicly accessible video stats beneath the watch page player, 73,183 of the 93,692 views came from mobile devices!

Holy mobile, Batman!

Adding Up Social Media and Mobile for Increased Results

When it comes to mobile miscalculations, if you’re not considering the increased accessibility of social media due to increases in mobile adaption, you’re missing out on an opportunity to interact with your customers.

Yes, apps are great and mobile sites are important, but they require planning and development, as well as distribution, hosting, and promotion — which can all result in added expense. Social networks are already in place and the expense of engineering them to be mobile-compatible is already incurred by people with big budgets (I’m looking at you Mr. Mark Zuckerburg) as opposed to your organization. The barrier to entry is low, so if you’re wondering how to implement a “mobile strategy,” consider starting with social media.


Need help resolving your mobile miscalculations or want to learn more about social media? Contact Mendy Werne to learn more about what BLASTmedia can do for you.

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