Marketing has gone through a revolution over the last decade, as mobile devices have become part of our culture and society. With practically every consumer and potential consumer directly accessible, brands have shifted marketing efforts to campaigns based around content and the personal communications devices we all carry with us every day.
Almost 60% of all virtual time spent is on mobile, and two out of every three digital minutes are via mobile devices. Considering that four out of every five consumers use their smartphones to shop, marketers need to know where all this traffic is going and where to concentrate their mobile marketing efforts.
Our research records mobile traffic usage
Check out our infographic – working in real time, measuring mobile traffic usage. Click the image to see it in action.
Facebook has more than two billion registered users and a billion+ active daily mobile users. At any minute of the day, there is an average of 700,000 people using Facebook from their phones. These users also have a very high engagement rate, as Facebook generates a million likes and 50,000 shares per minute on mobile. What truly makes Facebook a marketing dream is its ads interface and analytics. With Facebook, you can tailor your target audience from an extremely broad-based general campaign down to a specific demographic or geographic area.
Facebook has built many parts of its revenue model from targeting mobile since it launched ads for mobile in 2012, and 79% of Facebook’s revenue comes from mobile ads today. Facebook is a must for any marketer looking to seriously drive sales online, and most companies should earmark a large chunk of marketing budget towards it. Targeting mobile users tends to have better ROI (Return on Investment), CTR (Click Through Rate) and conversion rates on ads, so a mobile campaign over a desktop campaign is likely to receive a lot more traction.
Instagram as a social app has tremendous amounts of convertible traffic, too. Owned by Facebook, Instagram uses the same ad managers and campaigns can be run either on one or both. In terms of real-time use, every minute the 700,000 Instagram users add 280,000 stories and upload 175,000 pictures via their mobile devices. For visual media campaigns, Instagram has a higher CTR and conversion rate than Facebook, but lags slightly behind in ROI.
Instagram mobile traffic is increasing at a faster rate than any other social media platform and is especially strong in the under-35 age demographic. The incorporation of a mobile campaign and dedicated brand or product business profile on Instagram is a great way to increase exposure and push content-driven sales.
SnapChat
SnapChat is the newest of the major social media companies. Although ad campaigns cannot be targeted as easily, marketing departments can’t ignore the platform. In real time, SnapChat’s 210,000 users per minute send more than 2.1 million ‘snaps’ (short videos) and 544,000+ pictures every 60 seconds. This community also consumes vast amounts of content in real time, with more than 7 million views per minute. A key to using SnapChat for a brand or business is to have engaging content and build a ‘follower-ship’ on the platform. Consistency and frequent posts can help marketers build hype and spread product news at lighting speed.
Snapchat growth has been slowing due to Instagram changes that copied certain features pioneered by SnapChat, but the teen and young adult segments are holding strong.
The micro-blogging platform is a still a mobile traffic usage magnet, especially with adults above the age of 30. Twitter is great for short press releases or updates. When it comes to real-time traffic, Twitter has half a million users every hour, on average. Twitter is also more streamlined to direct traffic to outside sources, as it allows imbedding of offsite URLs in the posts. Twitter campaigns have been used by many of the biggest brands in the world and Twitter is still a great place to market in real time. As the most recent Tweets are seen first, it’s important to organise proper scheduling, to ensure maximum potential visibility. Schedulers, like Hootsuite or similar platforms, can help drive sales to your store or online product by keeping you close to the top of the Twitter news feed.
YouTube
Advertising on YouTube is one of the top ways of marketing to mobile consumers. YouTube has three main types of ads and can be targeted demographically or geographically. YouTube has the longest digital media time per use, compared to all other platforms.
Video marketing via YouTube is great, because it forces users to watch a small introductory clip prior to playing the content they wanted. This actually is ideal for engaging, content-driven campaigns. YouTube’s ‘truview’ program is also one of the best options, as a marketer is only charged when the ad is clicked on. Every minute, YouTube has more than 70,000 mobile hits and, every day, 1.4 billion+ videos are watched. In terms of real time results, YouTube campaigns come down to the quality and engagement of the content. A great campaign can generate huge volumes of convertible traffic, but a less engaging one will likely not get clicked due to saturation. If a marketer has a unique and engaging campaign or their strengths lie in content creation, then YouTube should definitely be part of the marketing mix.
Mobile searches
Another huge source of mobile traffic is mobile searches. Google, the biggest of these platforms, has an average of 436,477 mobile searches and 87,000-plus voice searches from mobile, every single minute. The marketing potential with Google is extremely useful to any business. By bidding on keywords that apply specifically to your product, service, area and sector, marketers have huge potential for conversion. ROI with mobile searches tends to be the highest from mobile, above all other high traffic sectors. This is due to the ease with which marketers can keyword-target their perspective consumers and ensure products are relevant to the search queries the mobile user inputs.
With mobile traffic and commerce set to double over the next few years, it is important to know what platforms are being adopted the quickest and which ones can generate the best real-time results.
All these platforms are great marketing tools and are likely the best ROI and general marketing tools for real-time conversions in 2017.
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