Social media marketing has officially gone mobile and it’s time that marketers begin to take the dawn of the mobile platform more seriously than before. Today, more than 60 percent of all users access social media through mobile devices like tablets, mobile phones and smartphones and the numbers are the same for all social media brands. Over the last year alone, the time users spent accessing major social media platforms increased manifold with Pinterest access rising 4,225 percent, LinkedIn access rising 114 percent, Twitter use rising by 140 percent and Facebook access rising by 85 percent. 16 percent of all users accessing social media through a mobile device claim that they use a tablet to connect to their social media platform of choice. This makes it all the more important for social media marketers to optimize their strategies to suit the mobile platform. Here are five easy ways that can help optimize social media content for readers using mobile devices.
1. Keep your posts thoughtful and well timed
According to Socialbakers, the first 30 minutes of a post is the most crucial factor that can determine half the reach and engagement of a Facebook post. This makes it all the more important for social media marketers to be careful about what they post and when they post it. The timing of the post would largely have to depend on the posting behaviors of their target demographics. Marketers would have to keep a keen eye on the times of the day when their target audience is more likely to make updates of their own to avoid getting buried under personal news feed. The best possible time for social media marketers to post updates is during lull times, i.e. when users are likely to be online but not likely to make updates of their own. Another key factor would be the quality of the post. Users are more likely to notice an update from a social media marketer with exciting content while a regular post is likely to be ignored even when the user is browsing the site aimlessly.
2. Add value to the mobile experience to make it different to the desktop experience
Users accessing social media through the desktop don’t really mind when clicking a link leads them to a whole new page. Sometimes they even prefer to be taken a new page instead of having a link simply expanding on the same page. But the same does not hold true for mobile users. Mobile users don’t have the same luxury of having a powerful processor and a large screen that would accommodate multiple open pages. This fact must be remembered by social media marketers and they must avoid posting a lot of content with links that take users to another site.
3. Design for mobile before desktops
Flash animation and HD YouTube videos are a great way to make your social media campaign look awesome for desktop users. For mobile users, the same might not be as appealing as HD videos often takes a lot of time to load and stream on mobile devices and many mobiles simply do not support flash videos. Also, barely legible font and graphics may dilute the quality and appeal of your posts for mobile users. For these reasons alone, you should design your social media campaign for mobile users first and then create a campaign more suited for desktops.
4. Understand different mobile platforms through tests
Different mobile platforms allow different types of content interaction experience. For example, users with an iPhone or Android phone can’t click on links in the captions of individual photos in a Facebook photo album. But these links work just fine when users access them through tablets. There are a lot of other differences between mobile platforms and knowing these comes in handy when you are targeting users accessing social media through a particular platform.
5. Check analytics
Before you redo your content type for a particular kind of audience, you really need to dig into the metrics and check what kind of audiences your page is drawing and what percentage of them are accessing social media through the mobile. Optimizing from this basis upwards really helps streamline your content to the needs of the target demographic.
