The social network is working on appealing to this market through a promise of successful advertising.
In an effort to become more appealing to app development firms, Facebook has been testing an entirely new form of mobile ads service since at least the end of January, which provides advertisements directly to a certain handful of smartphone and tablet applications.
Now, that social network is starting to indicate that an official launch of the service may occur in April.
The suggestion has been made that the mobile ads service could be launched at the F8 developer conference, next month. This would make an offering to all app makers for an entirely new revenue source that had not previously been available through the social media giant. Until now, the platform simply wasn’t in a position to truly assist developers in being able to monetize their apps.
Facebook has now taken its time to develop a mobile ads service that it believes will promise success.
According to Ilya Sukhar, who is responsible for the oversight of developer efforts at Facebook, “That had to be figured out.” He went on to say that “There just generally was a period of time when the company, as has been widely reported, has been figuring stuff out [on mobile]. This is a signal that we think we’ve figured it out.”
He explained that assisting developers in being able to monetize their applications will be a central focus of the announcements that will be made next month at the conference. In the past, the F8s in the past were primarily focused on rolling out features on Facebook that were more consumer facing. This will be different, this year, as developers will be nearly the only focus of the event, according to Sukhar, who also added that it will “help folks build, grow, and monetize their apps.”
Monetizing is one of the largest struggles faced by mobile app development companies. As Facebook has considerable strength in monetizing attention, they are hoping to be able to combine those two environments through their mobile ads service, for mutual benefit between themselves and developers.
However, a study shows that there are more people who value it than are actually using it.
Recent research is indicating that female business owners are feeling quite optimistic, overall, about the way that their companies will be performing over the upcoming year, and that many of them feel that social media marketing could play a notable role in helping to enhance outcomes.
That said, a surprising number of women business owners are not using this technique, despite the value they assign it.
The research from the National Association of Women Business Owners and Web.com Group, Inc., showed that 89 percent of women feel that their business performance will be positive throughout this year. This is an increase of 8 percent over the figures that were registered last year when women business owners were asked the same question. Among those who participated in the survey, most said that social media marketing was important for building relationships with customers.
In fact, 85 percent of women business owners felt that social media marketing was important for this purpose.
However, at the same time that this vast majority expressed that they felt this way, only 67 percent of this same group said that they were currently using one of the social networks in order to connect with customers. At the same time, only slightly over half felt strong enough in their ability to build a presence over social media in order to achieve this goal. When all was said and done, only about one in every four female business owners are posting comments at least one time per day.
Among those that were posting over social media, the preferred site was also surprising. Although Facebook is by far the largest social network and it receives the highest amount of traffic, it was still used by only 21 percent of the respondents. LinkedIn had the top spot at 25 percent. This could suggest either that women prefer the latter network or it could also indicate that many of the survey participants were marketing business to business – for which LinkedIn would be the top choice.
This year could be a defining one for social media marketing, as the perception of its value continues to rise, but at a greater rate than its adoption among this demographic.
