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Don’t Go Social. Go Mocial
Okay, so I made that word up. There’s no such thing and I don’t expect anyone to start calling Social Media on Mobile devices Mocial anytime soon. To be fair to me, Shakespeare contributed thousands of words to the English language, and I think I’m getting really, really close to his level. Yup.
Enough about me. I want to set up the next couple of blogs you’ll be seeing from us in May, or as we always call it “Mobile May.” Actually, we’ve never called it that. That’s officially the first time, but rest assured you were here to experience it. Don’t you feel extraordinary?
The next couple of weeks we are going to get right down to the soft chewy core of the question that has plagued e-commerce sites since AOL. You’ve been asking “How the heck does mobile really impact my e-commerce site?” We’re gonna try to tackle that questions this month. In fact, we’re gonna try to take it down Office Space style.
Next week you will hear from Gosia in our SEO department, and the week after that from Kristina in PPC, but to kick things off today I am going to talk about it from the most exciting corner of internet marketing (because I say so, and I’m creating the first blog): Social Media.
[Trumpets]
This past week, no rush, I finally got around to reviewing the 367-page report from We Are Social for 2015. We Are Social took a very deep dive, as they are wont to do every year, into every corner of Social Media. They covered 30-countries in this version, spanning the entire globe, sampling the best possible data. I’ll spare you the whole show and smack you in the face with this one super-important slide:
“Whatever do you mean by showing me that?” you ask? Let me ‘splain. No, there’s too much. Let me sum up: 60% the people online are actively using social media channels. 80% of those people are accessing their social media account via mobile.
Social Media channels are no longer ancillary avenues of the internet.They are the freeways through which most users are navigating. We know this because it’s been beaten into our heads every blog we read. That, and the fact that we need to solve for mobile. Why? Because the access ramps for those freeways are the proliferation of mobile devices. If your site content does not cater to those platforms, then you may not be dead in the water now, but you may find your company dog-paddling like it was an Olympic sport very soon.
Let’s talk a little about what all this means to you…
If you are like most of us who receive some income from online, other than online gambling, you spend a percentage of your time reviewing Google Analytics or Piwik at some point in your month. Like many, your brand is on a couple social channels, but nobody in your company is specifically assigned to manage your profiles. In fact, some of those profiles haven’t been set up yet.
When you look into your analytics it’s no surprise that social media is somewhere at the bottom. You don’t see an ROI so it’s right where you expect to see it. Organic Search comes out on top as your strongest downline, and then in some order based on how your budgets work, referrals, direct, paid search, and good old social media hang on for dear life.
What you may not be discovering in your deep dive is how social is affecting your organic search. You can see the line item for search, but you can’t measure how that tweet you sent out [or, sad face, DIDN’T send out] last month is playing into Google’s algorithm. What you definitely won’t see is how mobile platforms, where users are not engaging your brand for one reason or another, are also affecting your organic results, negatively.
What you definitely won’t see is how the average person in the united States spends almost two-and-a-half hours per day on social media channels. That’s about 17-hours a week, or or about 75-hours per month that you’re brand isn’t making its mark. Seventy-five hours. That’s nearly every episode of Mad Men through season six. Every month!
Okay, so you get it. People are on social media, and they access it primarily through their mobile devices. So what? Social Media is for mom and pop spots, restaurants, and brick and night clubs. You’re Coca-Cola and don’t need the press. Except if you were Coca-cola you would have nearly 6-million combined followers across Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn (5,700,953 to be exact). Is this horse dead yet?
You gotta be on social media. Not because it’s the next hot thing, but because it’s the next hot thing. Social media isn’t the freeway of the internet. It’s the skin the internet is sliding into. Think AOL, but not so Monopoly-like, and way more fun to use. Social Media is the internet, and mobile is how people get there.
[ctt tweet=”Social Media isn’t the freeway… It’s the skin the internet is sliding into. Mobile is how people get there. http://ctt.ec/51bcf+ ” coverup=”51bcf”]
Okay, the horse is nearly dead. Hang in there. What does mobile have to do with all of this? A lot.
Let’s create a persona: “Barb” Let’s say she’s a forty-something mom, who works teaching in the school district. Despite her distaste for the increased prevalence of these things in the classroom, she’s just purchased her first iPhone. Actually, her daughter who’s fresh out of college made her buy it because she hated that old flip Mom was carting around. Not to mention she wants to be able to text Mom from time to time.
Barb doesn’t really know about all this technology, but after her daughter spends some time showing her around the new iPhone, she really likes pushing the buttons and opening apps. She especially like this new Pinterest app. There are recipes, and photos of the beach, and some annoying fitness photos, but by the end of day one she has a profile and her first couple of boards set-up.
Barb doesn’t really know about all this technology, but after her daughter spends some time showing her around the new iPhone, she really likes pushing the buttons and opening apps. She especially like this new Pinterest app. There are recipes, and photos of the beach, and some annoying fitness photos, but by the end of day one she has a profile and her first couple of boards set-up.
She also downloads the app for Facebook, since she already had an account, but now she has an easy access point to use it. All the time. In fact, suddenly she find herself overlooking the occasional smartphone in the classroom, not because she’s really okay with it, but because she knows the kids won’t say anything when she spends their test time pinning recipes, and updating her Facebook status. She’s never been so active on Facebook before. In fact, she’s never been online so much before.
This is happening all over the place. It has been for a long time, and not just in the developed world, but in the darkest corners of the not-yet-developed world. People who were otherwise not online, other than work email, and the occasional desktop search, are finding themselves increasingly online, and it’s all through the magic of mobile. What’s more is their interface with the online world is the size of one hand.
Your site looks fine. Don’t worry. You were way ahead of the mobilegeddon disaster by two-years. No sweat. The problem isn’t how your site looks to Barb. The problem is she never sees it. There are no off-ramps from her freeway to your site. You’re barely on Facebook, with sparse content that isn’t optimized for the platform, and you have nothing on Pinterest.
You think you’re online because from your perspective, you ARE online, and you’re right. You are. But to someone like Barbara, and there are a lot of Barbs out there, online is a world only filtered through her Pinterest boards and her Facebook feed from her mobile device. It’s not only what she spends all her free time searching, it’s also what she talks about at lunch, and when her daughter video-phones her: “Did you see what so-and-so posted today?” Barb is 50% of the U.S. population.
So what do you do with this information? You can go on as you have been, and let the chips fall where they may. At some point you will, be talking about what your company is doing to leverage social media channels through mobile. Or you can get started today. Hire an in-house social media manager, and direct that person to solve for mobile, or you can contact us. We can help.
I know. This whole thing was a pitch. Gross, right? But maybe not. Maybe what gross is all the money you’re leaving on the table by being the last one to the game. It’s time to get Mocial. Catchy, eh?
Categorised in: Blog, Mobile, Social Media
This post was written by downtownecommerce_admin
