As the number of smartphone users rise, the ability to get real-time location-based information depending on where you are has also risen. Getting directions, finding out where exactly you are and find out where the nearest shops, restaurants, cultural hotspots and places of interest has grown in importance. It’s why more and more people are using services like Google Maps, Facebook Check-in and Foursquare when they’re out and about.
A new report from Pew Research has found that almost three-quarters (74 per cent) of U.S. smartphone users surveyed get real-time location-based information on their phones as of February 2012, an increase from May 2011 where it was 55 per cent. This increase coincides with a rise in smartphone ownership overall from 35 per cent of adults in 2011 to 46 per cent in 2012. It also means that the overall number of U.S. adults who access location-based information has almost doubled over that time from 23 per cent in May 2011 to 41 per cent in February 2012
Geosocial services like Foursquare also experienced an increase in usage. Around 18 per cent of smartphone owners use geosocial services on their phones, compared to 12 per cent back in 2011. This roughly equals 10 per cent of all adults using these services in February 2012. Unsurprisingly, of all of the smartphone owners who use geosocial services, 93 per cent also get location-based information such as directions and GPS.
The survey was compiled by Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and was carried out from January 20th to February 19th 2012 where 2,253 adults were asked about their use of location-based services.
The mobile social networking space just heated up last night with Facebook and Google both launching major updates that could change social networking for good. As I’ve been saying for some time now, the race for the desktop is well and truly over with Facebook winning hands down. However, when it comes to the mobile experience, Facebook is still facing some serious issues and Google+ just launched an app last night that is so beautiful in design and so easy to use, they might just have a chance of getting some traction as a social network.
It is amazing to see so much innovation coming on mobile devices and it’s hard to believe we’re only at the start of this revolution. Here are the big changes to the mobile apps and what it means for you as a user or as a brand.
Google + Just Gave Themselves A Chance On Mobile
You will all know how negative I can be on Google+ and I didn’t expect anything other than an ordinary update to their app last night. But when I tested it out, I was stunned with the sheer beauty of it. The app, which launched on iPhone only (that in itself was a surprise given that Google owns Android), is a completely new social networking experience and reminds me of Path.
Google has already lost the desktop experience to Facebook, but this app brings them to the race on mobile. Although I still doubt that they can steal users away from Facebook, this is easily the best app I have ever played with in terms of functionality and design. It’s absolutely stunning and a joy to use.
Just like anyone else who gets annoyed with the slow experience on the Facebook app, I loved playing with this because of the sheer speed and responsiveness of it. Having said that, after playing with it for ten minutes, I realised that nobody I really know or wanted to talk to was on the app. The old catch 22 for Google is that their product is the best by far but nobody wants to use it.
Facebook Trying To Take On Apple
Until a year ago, Facebook was more or less locked out of the mobile space thanks to competitors like Apple and Android, but you only have to look at the screenshots to see that they are trying to get in on the action. For the first time ever, app developers will be able to charge for their apps and considering the huge viral distribution that Facebook provides, this could be huge.
Crucially, the way in which apps are listed is changing so that it forms a more seamless experience for the consumer. Instead of apps winning by being noisy or spammy as they currently do on Facebook, detailed listings and suggestions will be served up to you with nice art work. You can read all about the app center here and it will be coming very soon to Facebook.
Social Networking Leaving The Desktop For The Mobile
What this means for consumers and brands out there is that the shift away from desktop computers and laptops for social networking is well under way. Most people are interacting with these platforms while on the go and Facebook is starting to cannibalise their own revenues as more people are accessing it on mobiles than on desktop. People aren’t going to stop using their desktops any time soon, but the speed of change is gathering pace and it is great to see the big guys embracing these wide ranging changes.
Just because the Google+ app is beautiful doesn’t really mean you should be setting up your brand presence there just yet simply because the number of users there are too small. It could be the app that finally gives the network some traction though and it’s one to be watched. Although Facebook has over 500 million mobile users, the options for brands are limited at the moment, but it’s the space that I would be looking for innovative solutions if I was a brand or business.
Facebook will start offering mobile advertising solutions in the near future and when they tie it in with location, it could power a whole new level of social commerce and grow into an app store that rivals Apple. Interesting times ahead and we are only at the very start of the race. Fire those mobiles up.
If you needed any evidence that mobile will play a massive part in Facebook’s fortunes, then a new report from comScore shows just how popular the site is to mobile users. Its latest report states that on average, visitors spent 441.3 minutes (7.35 hrs) on the mobile site and app in March.
This puts it a significant distance from its nearest competitors, Foursquare and Twitter where visitors spent an average of 145.6 minutes and 114.4 minutes respectively. The figures reveal the growing importance of mobile for every social media site and the need to adjust in order to suit the format.
In terms of unique visitors to their mobile site, Facebook was also out in front with 78 million unique visitors in March. Twitter was the second largest with 25.59 million visitors while LinkedIn and Pinterest had 7.6 million and 7.4 million uniques respectively. Despite having the second highest average minutes spent on a site, Foursquare only had 5.49 million unique visitors, but their amount of time their users spend on the site suggests a high engagement rate among its users.
One caveat for Twitter is that these figures don’t include usage via third-party apps, which suggests that its reach and the amount of minutes spent on the site could be much higher than what already here. It wouldn’t be enough to knock Facebook off the top spot, but the amount separating the two would be that little bit smaller overall.
Outside the social media sites, the most popular apps for both Apple and Android were iTunes and Google Play followed by Google Maps for iOS and Google Search for Android. The reason for Google’s products being second is because they are automatically included in the home screen for either iOS: Google Maps is displayed as an app on the main screen (unless you move it elsewhere) while the Google search bar automatically features on the home screen for every Android operated device.
Considering it’s become a massive part of their overall strategy, sponsored stories are slowly beginning to make their way onto the Facebook platform after they were announced at fMC back in February. Now after much waiting, it seems that Facebook is ready to introduce the advertising platform onto mobile if their latest announcement is anything to go by.
On the Facebook studio blog, the company has announced that sponsored stories will now appear on mobile phones and is currently available in all global regions. As there’s over 480 million people accessing Facebook monthly on mobile platforms, it was always a case of when they would get round to introducing sponsored stories. Sponsored stories on mobile are available through Premium on Facebook, which offers distribution on the right hand side of the homepage and in the news feeds on both desktop and mobile platforms.
The fact that’s you can’t purchase Sponsored Stories on mobile separately means that the format will perhaps only be used by the brands who have a bigger advertising budget. Although this pairing isn’t a surprise as Facebook did release a demo app offering examples of how the ads will be displayed on desktop and phone.
Also featured articles have recently appeared in the news feed. The section chooses articles that have been read by your friends and only features those media outlets who have a dedicated Facebook app like Yahoo! News, The Washington Post and The Guardian. Whether there are other factors that contribue to what articles start trending or not is unclear but the number of times an article has been read and which of your friends has read it would be the two obvious factors in determining this.
With the growing number of smartphone and tablet users emerging in recent months, many businesses and brands are trying to adapt to a new medium and develop their advertising and marketing strategies. Now Google has decided to release a mobile playbook designed to help businesses better understand and utilise mobile.
Designing it for tablet devices, with the option of visiting it online, viewing it on smartphone and allowing you to download it as a PDF for offline viewing thanks to its HTML5 roots, the playbook is designed not only to give tips for mobile strategies, but also demonstrate how effective advertising on this medium is through interacting with the book itself.
The guide poses five questions that all businesses should ask themselves: how does mobile change how brands interact with consumers, how much does mobile affect consumers visiting your site. is your organisation adapting to mobile, how should a business’ marketing adapt to mobile and how could a brand connect to a tablet audience.
On the Google Mobile Ads Blog, the head of Google’s Global Mobile Sales And Strategy Jason Spero writes:
“We’ve had conversations with hundreds of business leaders about mobile over the past year and two clear themes emerged from these discussions. Today, companies understand that they need to invest in mobile to engage with their customers on this platform. The problem is, most don’t know where to start…We designed it for tablets first, then scaled the content up for the PC and streamlined it for smartphones. This way, we were able to ensure that readers will have an enjoyable browsing experience, no matter what context they’re in.”
That latter claim is true as the Playbook browses from page to page smoothly and makes good use of both desktop and mobile platforms. Even the smartphone version is well presented despite the obvious decrease in screen size. Google has also included a check list containing ten items that all businesses must do to win at mobile. The approach is obviously to encourage more people to use a medium that Google already has a foot in, but when it’s presented this well, who can complain?
Those interested can read or download Google’s mobile playbook here.
Social. Local. Mobile. These are the fastest growing trends in marketing today and are likely to stay for some time. In terms of media consumption, they’ve come to dominate consumer attention. In terms of targeting and communication, they’ve opened more precise channels. In terms of data and measurement, they are reinventing marketing. And in terms of technology, they are disrupting entire industries.
The convergence of Social, Local, and Mobile is often referred to as the SoLoMo phenomenon. Remember the term; you are likely to be hearing lots about it in the foreseeable future.
For the first time, brands can tie social and mobile engagements directly to offline transactions
The fundamental driver of SoLoMo is smart phone adoption. Millions of new smart phones are being activated every day. Mobile devices like the smart phone and tablet are the beginning of a post PC era. Billions of people will now be connected by their current location and interests.
The smart phone represents an opportunity to reach consumers at key times in the purchase decision making process. Knowing a consumer's location, as well as the time they're at that location, is the best predictor of his or her intent to buy.
Location-Based Engagement: The New Channel
There are several types of Location Based Engagements. The engagements that bring together Social, Location and Mobile are the most powerful. Engagements like check-ins and tagged tweets are being shared with a consumer’s social connections via Facebook, Twitter, Google, and/or Foursquare. What most retailers do not realise is that this activity is happening organically around their store locations every day. Consumers are increasingly sharing their experiences, which often include brands and places. Brands need to encourage this behavior and use it as a marketing tool.
What is Location based Marketing?
Location-Based Marketing (LBM) is defined as the use of mobile, social and location marketing to target mobile users within a certain geographic area. This is increasingly being called the SoLoMo space.
The location-based marketing channel presents unparalleled opportunities for marketers. It encompasses social media, direct marketing, consumer research, customer relationship management, loyalty, couponing, content, brand management, inbound marketing, search, customer acquisition, and more.
What types of businesses really benefit from Location based Marketing?
Location-Based Marketing is perfect for you if you want to promote your product or service to people within a specific area. In other words, if you’re a multi store retailer and you want to target people who are within a radius of each of your locations, then you need to consider Location Based Marketing.
Some Examples:
Transforming Retail
Ads and offers that integrate time and the consumer's location generate considerably more business than a generic advert. For example, half price lunch for people that check-in on Facebook or FourSquare after 2.30. This helps restaurants to extend the hours of lunch time trade and also ensure any unsold lunches fly out the door. This can be applied to all manner of retailers, to promote flash sales, move last season’s stock and promote new products in store.
Geographic Targeting for Impulse Items
Geo-targeting works particularly well for local businesses that sell low-cost, impulse items. You can now let prospects know about your offer when they’re in the vicinity, but few people are going to drop by for a last minute mortgage or wedding dress. Think about what you can offer consumers on the spot — like a cup of coffee, a complementary gift or free 15 minute fashion consultation.
Targeting a Geographic Niche
Usually ads are designed to reach as many people as possible. Even online targeted ads have a wide reach. But when you’re looking for hungry people near a certain street in Dun Laoghaire, that really narrows the field. The benefit? You’re not paying for people outside of the catchment area to see an ad for a restaurant in Dun Laoghaire.
Reaching out to this Audience
At The Search Mill we have developed an online package that allows retailers to track location based engagements like check-ins and tagged tweets. This represents an opportunity to reach and engage a new audience of consumers and advocates. You can even identify your customers with the most influence online. Engaging these people is hugely rewarding.
Isn’t it time your business considered Location based Marketing?
As an area predicted to grow over the next few years, mobile commerce is being pushed by many brands and companies, Paypal in particular has spearheaded an aggressive expansion to try and control the market. However, for more traditional outlets, implementing such practices in-store or outside it poses their own problems.
One solution to this problem is the poster store concept, where a list of goods and accompanying QR code is displayed in a busy area. Originally introduced by Tesco in Korea back in June, the idea has proven popular enough for other retailers and companies to try it out in subways, shopping centres and other busy areas where potential consumers could be found.
Scandinavian ecommerce platform provider Jetshop decided to try this method of shopping out in Stockholm Central Station. To highlight the benefits and convenience of m-commerce, they set up a pop-up superstore which took up over 130 square meters.
With 20 different retailers such as Amazon Marketplace participating in the campaign, commuters had the opportunity to purchase goods such as DVDs, clothing, games and cosmetics. Each product was accompanied by a QR code which, when scanned, provided further information about the product and an option to purchase via smartphone.
With over 250,000 commuters passing through the station every day during the week that the store was in operation (March 12th – 18th), it meant that the superstore was (in theory) seen by roughly 1.5 million people.
Not only is the campaign a great way of getting the message of mobile commerce across, but it also works as a form of market research, showing what goods have the most success with this format. In their preliminary results, NFC World reported that the items usually associated with impulse buying, like T-shirts, books, DVDs and cosmetics were the most successful, while more expensive products, those priced over €150 to be exact, were met with little interest.
For this reason, getting 20 different stores to participate was clever as they could find out exactly which goods performed well and adjust their marketing strategy as such when approaching brands and businesses.
Is this the retail store of tomorrow as Jetshop say it is? Who knows, but with the information and findings this experiment brought, we may see stores like this pop up in stations and advertising billboards across cities over the next few years.
Following on from Twitter’s unveiling of Promoted Tweets and Stories, the company is giving brands and businesses more options to reach their target audience, in the form of targeted tweets.
Having introduced Promoted Tweets three weeks ago, these have been expanded so that brands can now target specific devices when running a campaign. The options include desktop computers and laptops, iOS, Android and other mobile devices. Alternatively, you can also target campaigns to users across all devices if you wish.
The idea is that if a brand has a campaign that requires users to have a smartphone to take part, then you can optimise your campaign so that you target only iOS and Android users, the example Twitter gives on its blog is that mobile game and app sellers can now pinpoint the users who are likely to purchase their products.
The reasoning Twitter gives for these changes are the millions of users who are now using smartphones as their main access to Twitter. A few months ago, their CEO Dick Costolo said that 55 per cent of Twitter’s active users can be found on mobile devices so the move makes complete sense.
Considering that Twitter earned $139.5 million for 2011 and are predicted to raise $540 million by 2014, it’s a real possibility that the latter target will be reached sooner than expected.
Considering how much importance Facebook are placing on the mobile experience, in both a practical and commercial sense, how developers and brands utilize their pages and apps is vital for its success. Their mobile strategy mainly features unobtrusive advertising that’s expected to be introduced soon, but now the company are now allowing (for now) developers to view just how well their apps are doing across mobile platforms.
In a recent blog post, Facebook software engineer Greg Schechter revealed that they have created a new Mobile Referrals dashboard to let developers see the traffic their app receives from mobile sources.
To access these stats, you must be an Admin, Developer, or Insights user of the app in order to view them. Finding them is simply a matter of visiting the main Insights dashboard. Underneath the traffic section will be two options, news feed (allows you to check your regular Insights data), and mobile.
Alongside the usual mobile clicks data and breakdown data of demographics and devices, mobile Insights also allows users to see just how exactly their app was accessed through source breakdown. The main areas that can be accessed are through the news feed, your timeline page, notifications, bookmarks (automatically displayed within Facebook once the user login to the app), search and unknown.
While this is only been released for app developers, there’s nothing to say that this feature won’t extend towards regular Insights for brand pages. There’s a massive mobile market out there for brands to take advantage of as that’s where more and more users are and despite the fact that Facebook have yet to convert brand pages on mobile devices to Timeline, it would still be useful information for them to have access to.
Very rarely will you ever come across a graph, map or anything related to technology that will look as stunning as this. Aaron Parecki, co-founder of Geologqi, a platform for real-time location, messaging and analytics, decided to illustrate all the data that he logged in through Geoloqui over the course of three and a half years. Once he had all the data gathered, it was run through a custom script that project the GPS logs onto a 2D map.
According to Parecki, approximately one GPS point was recorded every 2-6 seconds when he was moving, and the images represent about 2.5 million total GPS points. As he says himself:
“Collectively, they represent a data portrait of my life: everywhere I’ve been and the places I’ve been most frequently. The map is coloured by year, so you can see how my footprint changes over the years, depending on where I live…To get data at this resolution, I had to bring back-up batteries with me and charge my phone whenever I could. I would manually turn the tracker on when I moved, and turn if off when I was at an indoor location for a long period of time. To get this level of accuracy results in a great deal of battery drain.”
It’s fascinating (and perhaps a little unsettling) to see just how well our movements can be tracked and over such a long period of time. It also helps that the graphs are nice to look at, almost looking like a piece of art instead of a large amount of data represented visually. You can see the rest of Parecki’s graphs and visualisations on his Flickr page.
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As the number of smartphone users rise, the ability to get real-time location-based information depending on where you are has also risen. Getting directions, finding out where exactly you are and find out where the nearest shops, restaurants, cultural hotspots and places of interest has grown in importance. It’s why more and more people are using services like Google Maps, Facebook Check-in and Foursquare when they’re out and about.
