Regardless of your industry, chances are that many of your customers, clients and prospects are smartphone owners. If you’re employing a social media marketing strategy without carefully considering the impacts on your mobile customers - or how you could better leverage these opportunities - then you may be missing out on more business than you realise.A presence on Facebook is now essential for businesses, and optimising your Facebook activity for mobile is starting to become increasingly more necessary as a part of your overall campaign strategy.Australians have adopted smartphones and tablets into everyday culture faster than consumers in many other developed economies – and relatively speaking, when comparing our geographic size with other markets, Australia is one of the top major smartphone markets globally. Let’s put it into perspective:
It makes sense for businesses to try and tap into this phenomenally large audience. However, leveraging these mobile social networks can be a tough task, so how do you do this?Let’s look at Facebook – since it is the most widely used social media app. For a while, Facebook Mobile has been a tough area for advertisers and marketers to capitalise on.Previously, native ads have always been available on the desktop, but not the mobile interface – leaving companies just sitting and hoping that mobile users would notice their pages. Facebook’s algorithms EdgeRank and, more recently, the "rebooted" version of the algorithm known as Story Bump also made this a difficult task as they determine which stories appear more prominently in the News Feed based on how users have seen them. This means that the same content you use for your desktop Facebook strategy is not necessarily applicable for your mobile strategy.Here are our top tips for getting your content seen by your Facebook mobile audience:Make sure your content is valuable. Story Bump means that Facebook no longer ranks content based on implied preferences. Instead, with the exception of stories with plenty of positive engagement, the order of content in the News Feed is largely based on what was posted first. Make sure that the content you post isn’t just interesting but valuable to your audience. This will ensure you get that highly sought after positive engagement to keep your content at the top.Make engagement worthwhile. You want your mobile audience to engage with your content – but why should they? Most often, people won’t just provide their positive comments or feedback to a brand, they want to be asked for it. Ask them questions and include calls to action in your posts to help boost your feedback, and in turn, boost your exposure.Know your audience. There’s no right time of day to post for all pages– however, there is a right time of day to post for your audience. And the only way to understand this is through experience and analytics. If you post according to when your fans are active and engaging with content, then you stand a much better chance of being seen.Target your ads. This isn't just about targeting your ads based on interests or demographics. Facebook is now rolling out native ads for the mobile platform – allowing you to target ads specifically at mobile users. This means the ads look and feel different based on the parameters of the Facebook app, to provide a more engaging ad experience for mobile users. Don’t risk showing ads designed for desktop to your mobile audience – show them that you’re catering to their needs by targeting the ads accordingly.There are a plethora of mobile apps, each with a huge following – some of which may be part of your audience. There are huge opportunities to influence exposure through mobile, and Facebook is just one illustration of this.The question is – can your business afford not to leverage mobile?
