Mobile Marketing

Category: Mobile Marketing

M-commerce trends this year include mainstream use

Rebecca | December 12, 2013

The holiday shopping season has allowed the channel to become a standard form of comparison and purchasing.

The rapidly growing m-commerce trends of browsing, comparing, and actually buying on smartphones and tablets aren’t just a little piece of the fringe, anymore, but are starting to officially become mainstream.

Holiday shoppers, this year, have shown that even when they don’t make purchases, they use their devices.

Many analysts have been looking directly toward the purchasing data to determine whether or not m-commerce trends have been pointing toward the mainstream. However, when that data is considered, while there has been massive year over year growth, it still represents only a sliver of the total online purchases and even less of the buying as a whole. When the definition of mobile shopping is broadened, it soon becomes clear that purchasing is only one of several behaviors for which shoppers use their smartphones and tablets.

These m-commerce trends are important to recognize as they are often deciding factors for online and in store purchases.

M-commerce Trends That said, even without taking the browsing, price comparisons, receipt of advertising and discount coupons, and other activities into account, there has still been a great deal of growth, so far, over the holiday shopping season when it comes to mobile commerce purchases. But it seems to be in those “process” activities on the way to actually buying that small screens truly shine. IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark reported that almost 40 percent of all of the online traffic on Black Friday and almost a third of all online traffic on Cyber Monday was from smartphones and tablets.

Even though this did not represent the purchases being made, it shows that people are using their smartphones and tablets to visit websites and to look at companies, products, and prices. Because the devices are always with their owners, they are automatically using them, first, to perform quick searches, to locate nearby businesses, to find out whether or not the item that they want is in stock, and to discover the best possible price.

Three years ago, only 4 percent of Cyber Monday’s online traffic came from mobile. This makes it clear that m-commerce trends are headed toward – if they have not already achieved – mainstream status.

Social media marketing trends point out difference between Twitter and LinkedIn users

Julie Campbell | December 9, 2013

Recent data analysis has revealed that age plays an important role in the popularity of these networks.

According to a recent release from Doug Anmuth, an analyst from JPMorgan, there are some significant social media marketing trends being revealed that have to do with the age of the users of the various networks.

What he found was that the user base at Twitter tends to be younger than all other large networks, for example.

At the same time, Anmuth also pointed out that on the other end of these social media marketing trends is that the users of LinkedIn are slightly older than those of other networks. He revealed that Twitter may lean toward the younger users, it still has users across every age range. The heart of its user group in the United States is made up of people between the ages of 13 and 44. The age range representing the largest group of its users is from 25 to 34. That said, 10.1 percent of its users are between the ages of 13 and 17, which represents a sizeable group. Equally, 18.2 percent of its users are 18 to 24 years old.

This knowledge, as well as the ages on other networks, is important to social media marketing trends and campaigns.

The reason is that the fact that there is a difference of this nature from one network to the other could change the way that ads are placed and promotions are expressed from one platform to the next.

To demonstrate the difference, looking at Facebook, it reveals that the user range is considerably broader. Still the largest social network in the world, its largest segment is made up of 25 to 34 year olds, at 19 percent of its American user base. Another 17 percent was represented, each, by the groups of users in the 34 to 44 year old range and the 45 to 54 year olds.

At the other end of the scale, LinkedIn, the professional network, leans much more to an older crowd, with the majority of its American user base made up of people aged 45 through 54. Only 9.6 percent of LinkedIn users were within the 18 to 24 age group. Social media marketing trends may soon need to differ from one network to the next to ensure that they will appeal to the largest groups of users.