About Lucy...

Author: Lucy

Mobile payments battle is heating up between Samsung and Apple

Lucy | April 4, 2013

Formerly loyal customers are switching brands with each new service and product unveiling.

As the device battle rages on between Apple and Samsung, the mobile payments market is becoming a central battleground for the device manufacturers, as they pull out all the stops to draw consumers to not only their iPhones and Galaxies, but to their smartphone wallets, too.

Though iPhones are generally considered the industry head, it is Samsung that is leading the way.

The Korean electronics company features a broad range of Galaxy devices, available at different price points. This has made it the global leader with a recently reported market share of 29 percent in the 2012 fourth quarter. This is a massive increase over 2010’s market share, which was 8 percent. Apple is holding steady with a market share of 21.8 percent as of the same period of time.

As the two companies battle over device sales, mobile payments have also become an area for competition.

At the moment, these two companies appear to be each others’ greatest competitive threat both in device sales and mobile payments use. The primary battle is to be able to keep up with the latest in innovation, or it will be very easy to fall behind. This has also involved a number of attacks from within the companies.

For instance, on the day before the Samsung Galaxy 4S was unveiled, Phil Schiller, the chief marketing officer at Apple, gave one of his very rare interviews to the media, in which he openly criticized the “fragmented” software at Android, and on the Samsung devices, themselves.

This type of battle is expected to become even more fierce, say analysts, as the saturation point of the smartphone marketplace, and now the mobile payments market, approaches. This will mean that the growth of the companies will be driven primarily by stealing customers from one another, as opposed to trying to find customers that have not yet been reached.

That said, as much as Apple can criticize, author Clyde Prestowitz (of “Three Billion New Capitalists: The Great Shift of Wealth and Power to the East” fame), pointed out that in both device sales and mobile payments, “Samsung is very dangerous for Apple”.

Social media marketing revenues from Twitter predicted to break $300 million

Lucy | April 1, 2013

The company will be tweeting its way all the way to the bank in 2013 with the most recent forecast.

eMarketer has released its most recent projections regarding the social media marketing revenue that will be generated by Twitter this year, as well as what its ad revenue will be in 2014.

According to these predictions, the forecasts for advertising spending at the network are on their way up.

According to eMarketer’s predictions, in 2013, the social media marketing at Twitter will earn $582.8 million globally. That said, by the end of next year, the global ad revenue at the social network will have increased to almost $1 billion.

This is considered to be a notable turnaround for Twitter and its social media marketing successes.

Until 2011, social media marketing had not been a lucrative enterprise for the microblogging platform, so this is a very meaningful achievement for Twitter to have made.

According to the report that was made by eMarketer, “Advertisers have shown more interest in spending money on mobile advertisements on Twitter, and as recent audience figures from multiple research sources analyzed by eMarketer have suggested Twitter’s reach is improving.” The company also stated that it believes that the social network has benefited from the growing mobile focus, when all is said and done.

When competitors such as Facebook and Google+ placed a massive concentration of their efforts and investments on the mobile channel, Twitter seems to have ridden that wave and has been able to enjoy the social media marketing benefits that it has brought along with it. Each of its primary competitors – which currently lead it in revenues as well as in the number of active members worldwide – have implemented a massive expansion of their mobile ad offerings.

These efforts from the competition have managed to convince social media marketing companies to move their spending to mobile. Through this, Twitter has been able to increase the ad revenues that it has been generating through advertising for companies that have already been convinced partly due to the investments of the competition. Now it is hoping to continue along this trend in order to nearly double its ad revenues before the end of next year.