This is causing the smartphone based social media marketing revenue at the company to spike.
Facebook has been making a concerted effort to improve the experience that it provides to the users of mobile devices, and based on the ad revenues that it is generating through its social media marketing business, it looks as though those efforts are paying off.
Over half a billion Facebook users currently access their accounts exclusively over smartphones and tablets.
Facebook recently released that data as a component of its earnings presentation. By the close of last year, that social network recorded 1.19 billion active monthly users over mobile devices. This represented an increase of 26 percent over the figure that was recorded at the end of 2013. This tremendous rise in mobile traffic has meant that Facebook has also been able to bring in considerably greater earnings over mobile focused social media marketing ads.
The ad revenue generated from mobile devices makes up the majority of Facebook’s marketing income.
The company reported that the last quarter of 2014 brought in $3.59 billion in overall advertising revenue. Of that, 69 percent came from mobile ads, with the remainder being generated from the desktop and laptop side of things. This means that almost $2.5 billion was brought in through mobile ads, alone, in a period of three months. Year over year, that represented an improvement of 53 percent. It also proved to be the first quarter in which the mobile advertising revenue at Facebook broke the $2 billion level.
This type of healthy mobile marketing figures are critical to businesses such as Facebook, that have business models that are based on advertising. While internet users continue to use their browsing on laptops and desktops – and their banner ads – to smartphones and tablets – with their apps and mobile browsers that require different forms of advertising than the traditional types.
This has required Facebook – and other businesses hoping to generate meaningful revenue from ads displayed on mobile devices – to have to work very hard in order to create a strategy that will encourage users to actually click and take action on the links that are posted. The most recent effort that Facebook has made in this vein has been in opening up the social network’s user data up to brands that would be using the platform for placing ads.
She explained to the Mobile First conference audience that “This presents a huge opportunity.” She pointed out that the relationships that people have with their mobile devices has become much more complex and profound. Schachtel expressed that “People used to go to the mobile web to find one specific thing,” and added that “Then came the feed. … Now people discover, they share.”