Author: Julie Campbell

A poll has now shown that retirees in Canada are likely to have cell phones, though not the latest tech.

A recent report making mobile commerce news has revealed that while the vast majority of seniors living in Canada are now using a cell phone, only a small number of them have changed those mobile devices to the more modern smartphone version.

The Media Technology Monitor report could prove to be important information for marketing and commerce.

The research was conducted over the phone with the participation of 6,014 English speaking Canadians. The interviews were held during the spring and fall of 2013, in order to help to track the trends regarding ownership and usage of mobile devices. This included measuring the movements of these gadgets among those within the senior demographic. For the purposes of this study, seniors were defined as individuals who were 68 years old or older.

Approximately 61 percent of the seniors who were polled said that they owned mobile devices.

In all, there were 774 seniors who participated within this research. Though only 61 percent of them said that they had cell phones, in the younger age groups, a much higher 87 percent said that they carried these gadgets.

Similarly, only a tiny 13 percent of seniors said that they owned smartphones, where a notably higher 63 percent of younger Canadians said that they carried these devices.

Among those that did have smartphones, seniors seemed to prefer iPhones the most, though only just slightly more than Android based devices and BlackBerry phones.

A miniscule 7 percent of the senior participants in this study said that they used their smartphones for connecting to the internet. Younger respondents responded that 54 percent of them connected to the internet using their gadgets. Furthermore, only 2 percent had ever tried to use social media on their devices. Among the younger users, about a third of smartphone users had done so. Around 17 percent of seniors had sent text messages at some point, whereas 76 percent of the other respondents said that they had.

Approximately 12 percent of the seniors polled had tablets among their mobile devices. Most often, this consisted of an iPad.

Though the network’s new suite of ad products have been greatly hyped their performance is still lagging.

Even though Twitter’s newest suite of social media marketing products for mobile has experienced massive hype, it still appears that the microblogging network is falling behind its two giant competitors over this channel.

A recent report has shown that the ads from Twitter aren’t doing as well as Facebook and LinkedIn.

John Blackledge, an analyst from Cowen & Co. has reported that social media marketing ads on Twitter mobile are not performing as well as those that are posted on Facebook and LinkedIn. This suggests that Twitter may not be the dream ad opportunity that many of its investors have come to believe it to be. Blackledge explained that “Twitter is a popular social platform, but shares are too rich in our view.”

The focus on mobile social media marketing has reflected very positively in Twitter’s share prices.

The fall IPO price for Twitter shares in 2013 was $26. That said, by the end of December, that stock had exploded to $74 per share. Equally, though, the social network has not sustained the valuation.

Blackledge conducted some research making social media news, that involved fifty buyers and their opinions regarding the effectiveness of social media companies such as Twitter, and their mobile ads. Only 5 percent of the participants stated that Twitter provided the best ROI. Comparatively, the ads over Facebook were considered to provide the best performance by 60 percent of the participants, with 25 percent giving their applause to LinkedIn.

Those figures suggest that the low ROI is linked to pricing. Blackledge also pointed out that the respondents to his survey commented that some of the downsides of Twitter’s social media marketing tools with regard to advertising value proposition were “high minimum ad spend” and the “cost of campaigns”.

This year is supposed to be a defining one for Twitter, as its numbers and usage continues to grow. It will be interesting to see how today’s figures compare to those that will be generated later on in 2014 or those at the same time next year.