It’s 5am, broad daylight and the birds are making themselves heard. This is a good time for making contact with mums of equally noisy newborn babies – according to fresh statistics from Verto Analytics. The latest UK-based study has found that parents online behaviour has a lot to do with when Junior is taking a nap!
Parents of young children are woken early and are active online, and particularly on mobile apps, by 5am – with their long activity peaking in the afternoon and PC activity rising particularly in the late evening – after bath and (blissfully) bedtime.
How a child under the age of 18 months influences parents online behaviour
The study also found:
- New mums have higher device ownership across every digital device compared to the general population. They have an especially high rate of smartphone ownership (96%) compared to just 71% of the total population.
- They also index particularly high on home entertainment devices such as video game consoles, smart TVs and streaming media players.
- They spend more than 112 hours per month online via PC (20% more than the average adult) as their online time tends to be dominated by web rather than app usage
- They spend 76 hours per month online via mobile device (10% more than the average adult)
It seems new mums like platforms that allow them to control access/viewership to content or share content with a smaller subgroup (such as family members or friends). So, the more public forums – such as Twitter – have less appeal. Messaging apps like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp have higher-than-average reach among new mothers, compared to the general population, as do Google+ and Pinterest, while major social media properties such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter index lower, the report shows.
Search, shopping and social media take up more of their online time
The following website and app categories account for a greater share of the amount of time that new parents spend online:
- Search and reference (eg. Wikipedia, Google)
- Shopping (eg. Amazon, eBay and Boots)
- Social and communications (eg. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest)
New mothers index especially high in time spent on PCs, as their online engagement tends to be dominated by web usage rather than app interaction, said Hwong: “New mums are generally much more internet savvy and internet dependent than the average adult.
“Digital technology plays an ever-increasing role in how they organise and support their daily life after a new arrival to the family. Consequently, there’s a huge opportunity for marketers if they can tap into the rhythms of how new mums go online via different devices during the course of the day to make their lives easier.”
She added that marketers need to be aware of parents online behaviour and to target accordingly: “Marketers also need to be smarter in the platforms they target, such as Pinterest being a much more efficient way to reach new mums than the likes of Twitter.”
Read also:
Are 7 interactions optimal for driving maximum basket revenue for retailers?