Facebook On the Move

It was little more than five years ago that we were a nation, a world even, oblivious to the coming colossus that is Facebook. Of course Social Networking Sites (SNS) existed before Facebook, such as MySpace, but none were as entrenched in our everyday lives as Facebook has come to be. In 2006 Facebook became available using a mobile phone and since then has become by far and away the most visited mobile site or app; along with smartphone technology this has opened up whole new aspects of social networking, such as Facebook Places, and shaped the way we interact socially. Some phone manufacturers have taken steps to integrate Facebook even further into the user’s mobile experience, HTC for example allow users to link their contacts to their Facebook profiles and aggregate social media news in their ‘Friend Stream’. They have even released two smartphones, the Cha Cha and Salsa, which feature a dedicated Facebook button.

According to a study from leading web analytics company comScore, there has been significant growth in mobile access to Social Networking on both feature and smartphones over the last two years, though it is the latter that has seen the greater increase. A speaker from comScore at the MobRule event on 5^th April stated that In the UK last month 2.6 billion minutes were spent looking at Facebook on mobiles. Conversely, mobile access to SNS does not rise across the board. Both Facebook and Twitter have seen their number of mobile users rise dramatically over the past two years with 112% and 347% rises in users from Jan. 2009 to Jan. 2010 respectively, whereas MySpace dropped 7% in the same period.

According to social media marketing company Centrality Media, the average daily dwell time on any given website is under one minute but on Facebook it is nearly one hour (55 minutes). The main reason behind this seemingly vast dwell time (although Facebook addiction can’t be entirely ruled out) is surely the fact that users login, have a quick look around and then leave the site/app running in the background on their PC or phone if it supports multitasking. This behaviour and interaction with the website is strongly connected to SNS and almost certainly stems from the real-time updating that exists on these sites along with the vast amounts of user driven content. There are very few other sites around that possess this constant update aspect and even fewer, essentially none, boast such levels of user related data.

“Social media is a natural sweet spot for mobile since mobile devices are at the centre of how people communicate with their circle of friends, whether by phone, text, email, or, increasingly, accessing social networking sites via a mobile browser.” Mark Donovan, comScore senior vice president of mobile.

The level of actual interaction with the site is unlikely to be as high as the dwell time would suggest, however, the amount of time spent on the site is undoubtedly high and therefore an extremely useful means of business-user contact. Given the fact that marketing is significantly more effective if it is conducted in a place or situation that people are comfortable with, marketing techniques that utilise Facebook and other popular SNS have a much higher chance of success than those that depend upon drawing users away.

For example, placing a billboard directly outside someone’s house all but guarantees they will see it every day, whereas putting signs to one that is round the corner only ensures people who want to see it know where it is. This is similar to marketing on Facebook internally through fan pages and groups, and marketing on pages that users may or may not visit regularly using ads that divert them away from what they are doing. The reach of Facebook has really come to light in the past couple of years with groups propelling music singles back to number one in protest of the music industry, involvement in organising large scale mobilisation of disgruntled students and raising awareness for various causes. This reach gives companies and brands the freedom to expose themselves to consumers in a less intrusive way than standard advertising whilst still benefiting from increasingly accurate targeting that the platform assists.