Tag: social media

Mobile devices are the exclusive access for half a billion Facebook users

| February 3, 2015

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.

Mobile Devices - facebookThe 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.

Facebook will be using different mobile apps for many of its features

| January 5, 2015

The social network will be facing a number of changes in its user experience over smartphones and tablets.

Facebook has decided that one or two mobile apps isn’t taking up enough real estate on smartphones and tablets and has now announced that in 2015, it will be dividing many of its features into a number of different separate applications, instead of a more all-in-one opportunity that it previously provided.

The social network has stated that it is going forward with this decision and it will be starting quite soon.

In 2015, it plans to start to move a growing number of its features away from its main application and into separate mobile apps of their own. According to the Facebook Canada managing director, Jordan Banks, who is also the global head of vertical strategy for the company, “We’re getting away from that single app that does everything for you. We released nine different apps in 2014 and I think what you’ll see is we’ll release more in 2015 — at the demand and behest of our users.”

Facebook feels that its users wants separate mobile apps that will each do one thing very effectively.

Facebook Mobile Apps Banks explained that they feel that most of the users of mobile social media would like features in individual apps “that do one thing incredibly well.” Therefore, they have taken Messenger out of the main Facebook app, for example, and have placed it into its own standalone app. They claim that the reason they have done it is that “that’s what our users were telling us. They didn’t want to click two or three times before they got into Messenger.”

For this reason, Banks expressed that it is likely that this will be a considerable trend for the company as it moves forward. Facebook will start to be focused on issuing more individual apps with the new features from the company, instead of continuing to build on one central application.

Although at the time of the writing of this article, Banks stated that he had heard only positive feedback about the decision, users have been complaining quite loudly about the separate mobile apps for different features, particularly in terms of the Facebook Messenger option. At the Apple App Store, there are currently a larger number of one-star reviews for the decision than there is applause.