Different mobile activities lead to different behaviors and engagement levels
AUGUST 31, 2011
By eMarketer.com

With smartphones able to perform a variety of tasks, from communicating to information-seeking to shopping and beyond, consumers are spending more time with them than ever. And marketers have more chances than ever to reach them via mobile.

According to research from Yahoo! and Ipsos, smartphone users spend the bulk of their mobile time (38%) connecting, including by voice, SMS, IM, email or social media. They spend just under half as much of their mobile time with search or entertainment, and a relatively small 7% of their time shopping.

But mobile shopping is the task marketers are most interested in when it comes to smartphone users, especially in regards to advertising. The Yahoo!/Ipsos research found that US smartphone users were most likely to recall and engage with ads they saw while shopping on their phone. Nearly two-thirds of users had seen an ad while shopping and more than half that number had clicked on one.

Most of those ads are likely to have been seen in a mobile browser, since smartphone users typically preferred to shop using a browser vs. an app. In fact, for three of the top four ad recall activities, smartphone users were likely to be using a browser.

Connecting, by contrast, was most likely to be done outside a browser and least likely to involve an ad that smartphone users remembered or clicked on. This is unsurprising, since ads are most likely to seem disruptive when mobile users are conversing with friends and family by calling or texting.

eMarketer expects advertisers to spend $1.1 billion on mobile this year, and display ads, including those based in browsers, are expected to post solid growth, soon becoming the top mobile ad format.

Rob D. Young, August 29, 2011
emarketer.com

More than a third of external referrals to Facebook pages come from search engines, and SEO plays a strong role in generating this additional traffic for a Facebook page, according to a study from PageLever.

The PageLever Study
The study was conducted by Jeff Widman at PageLever. He used the Facebook API to get raw data on external traffic referrals and used PageLever to organize the data and separate the search engine referrals. Widman looked at 1,000 pages with a minimum of 10,000 fans each from January 1 to June 30 of this year. His figures represent the averages for that time period.

Widman found that 33.98 percent of traffic came from Google, Yahoo, or Bing. It should be noted, however, that this is 33.98 percent of external referrals – meaning that the search referrals comprise about 9.5 percent of total traffic to Facebook pages.

That number is still surprisingly high, and it’s also a bit strange what a high percentage comes from Google. Google was the source of 27.57 percent of external referrals, compared to 4.11 percent from Yahoo and 2.3 percent from Bing. As Widman notes, “since Bing has a offical partnership with Facebook, I would have expected the disparity between [Google and Bing] to be lower.”

While the PageLever study wasn’t aimed at experimenting with SEO for Facebook pages, it does note data trends that indicate optimization is a vital factor in the volume of external referrals and the total number of pageviews.

“Optimizing for SEO really paid off for several of these Fan Pages,” states Widman, pointing to the large variance between pages and specific pages that received a really substantial portion of their traffic from search sites.

Presumably, Facebook page SEO involved the same core factors as standard page SEO, including the creation of frequent quality content that’s visible to search, building inbound links, and avoiding common pitfalls such as duplicate content.

AUGUST 29, 2011
emarketer.com

Do millennials really interact most with brands on social sites?

Older social media users have grown more likely to follow brands on social media sites as they’ve gained more experience interacting on them, but younger adults still outnumber them in this activity. Millennials’ enthusiasm for making friends with brands, though, may not be too far above average.

The “American Millennials” survey, conducted by Barkley in advance of September’s Share.Like.Buy conference, found that over half of millennials, defined here as consumers ages 16 to 34, liked checking out brands on social media sites. That compared with just over a third of older adults.

The survey, fielded in partnership with the Service Management Group and sponsored by Boston Consulting Group, also found that a third of millennials like brands more if they use social media. That was nearly double the percentage of older adults who said the same. Still, over 30% of millennials thought it was annoying for brands to be on sites like Facebook and Twitter—making this group less tolerant of social media marketing than those 35 to 74.

The Barkley survey did find that millennials were more likely than older adults to “like” a brand on Facebook, and did so more often. And interaction rates were somewhat higher as well.

Nearly one in four millennials (23.5%) interacted with content from a brand’s Facebook page at least once a daily, vs. 17% of older adults who did the same. Millennials were also 4.4 percentage points more likely to interact with brand content between one and six times per week. While similar shares of both age groups interacted at lower frequencies, overall older adults were nearly twice as likely never to engage with brand content on Facebook.

Brands have the opportunity not only to attract younger adults as fans of their brand, but also to interact with them frequently once they do. The fact that many millennials sign on to Facebook almost every day, and a substantial percentage are willing to engage with brands that often, means that a stream of updated and valuable content has the potential to attract their attention over and over—as long as it doesn’t annoy them.