The Rise and Rise of Mobile
Looking forward: smartphones and mobile reign over the social media castle.
Smartphone usage has grown exponentially since the first iPhone hit the shelves at the dawn of 2007. They have shifted from being a luxury item for the tech-obsessed community to an affordable and vital piece of equipment to have in your pocket. They are becoming more and more ubiquitous as time moves forward, and it is not hard to work out why. Mobile phones are now undeniably and irrevocably intertwined within our culture and lives. The street is awash with handsets and distracted attentions (how many more mounds of dog poo have been accidentally stepped in by unwary feet since the smartphone revolution? And who can actually use text & walk anyway?)
Steve Jobs iPad 2 Keynote
At the unveiling of the iPad 2 recently, where a defiant Steve Jobs took to the stage to give the keynote, Apple revealed that they have sold 100 million iPhones to date, as well as 15 million iPads in the first 9 months of release [1]. Apple’s (arguably) closest competitor, Android, is purported to surpass 75 million handsets by 2012 [2], and they are chasing down RIM’s market share at a rate of knots.
The numbers paint a skewed picture, however, because while it may seem as though Android is taking chunks out of the side of the Apple behemoth, it’s more like Android feeder fish removing parasites from a passing stingray. As reported in Techcrunch, research firm IHS found that in terms of app revenue, Android jumped 861.1% between 2009 and 2010. This figure is dwarfed by the fact that, while an impressive rise, the $102m revenue figure for Android in 2010 is a paltry 4.7% of the market share, with Apple taking 82.7%, and $1.7bn in revenue. [3]
Mobile sales paint a comprehensive picture
According to recent Garner research, overall worldwide mobile sales totalled 1.6bn units in 2010, with a staggering 19% of that market going being smartphone sales – a rise of 72% from 2009.[4] This prolific adoption of smartphone technology is confirmed by the Cisco Visual Networking Index that reports mobile data usage grew 2.6 fold from 2009 to 2010, with the average data usage for smartphone users more than doubling from 35MB pcm to 79 MB pcm. [5] Some other interesting forecasts were that by the end of 2011, 50% of mobile data usage will be video alone
Data consumption trends are shifting
The way we consume information is fundamentally shifting towards an ‘always-on’ world where our mobile phones are the first port of call for access to the web. A recent blog post on Techcrunch found that in February 2011, just under 14% of the access to their site was on a mobile device, up 702% from the 1.97 share in February 2009. Add this to the fact that Twitter CEO, Dick Costolo, recently said that 40% of all Tweets are now composed on mobile devices up from around 20% in 2010 and we begin to see a pretty clear picture of the way things are moving. Indeed, more research recently suggested that the number of people accessing social media services from their phones in the US alone will rise by 20% annually between now and 2015. [6]
Some of the most interesting research of late, however, is from Accenture who surveyed 1100 ‘tech-forwards’ across 11 countries (who they define as people who are at the forefront of technical innovation, the early adopters). The study’s more salient points are found in the attitudinal differences between Asian and US & European respondents. While both groups felt concerned over privacy issues with mobile technology, it was the Asian respondents that had more positive attitudes towards making payments on their mobiles. The actual usage of mobile services was also surprising in that Asian respondents are already actively using their mobiles to pay for and interact with services / their environment, a lot more that the US and European groups. A good breakdown of the findings can be found here.
Social Media Implications
The implications of this shift for the social media industry are huge. While it is certainly not news that mobile is on the rise, there is perhaps still the idea that mobile is a supplementary platform rather than an agent in a hostile takeover.
It does make perfect sense, however. As Molly Flatt of 1000heads recently said, “people forget that social media isn’t a marketing tool…it was created for ordinary people to connect with each other and to shockingly be social”. Social media lends its self beautifully to the ‘on-the-go’ mentality, because people tend to be more ‘social’ when out and about and interacting with the people they see on a day to day basis.
We’re not talking about social media marketers here; social media marketers are not social media users, they are the die-hard evangelists of the services they use to reach out to people with. Ultimately they see the idea of ‘social’ in a different light to the people that they are trying to reach, so it’s really important to be able to step back and look at the picture through the eyes of a user.
So what does this all mean for our industry? With consumption increasingly becoming mobile-centric it is vital to design campaigns and sites around the format. We must take into consideration the fact that the social web is connected to the real world even closer now; people are Tweeting, using Facebook, and taking film and photos on the go more than ever, and they are sharing them live. People should be able to engage with their brands from within the mobile environment with as little need to go ‘online’ as possible.
On top of this, websites and communities need to ensure that their content can be accessed by mobile devices easily, and there needs to be a real emphasis on making sure this happens as at the moment there is a distinct lack of mobile optimisation across the web – Like inviting people to a party at a house with a locked door, there doesn’t seem to be much of a point.
This post was originally written for @FreshNetworks, and can be seen in its more succint format on the FreshNetworks Blog.
