Mobile - meet Social Media

Mobile is one of the fastest growing channels for marketing and advertising in the last few years. And in the next few years marketing spend towards mobile channel is expected to grow at an even faster rate. Social networking is one of the fastest-growing activities and with a large set of demographics, social media users use mobile phones to access social media sites. This is fueling the growth of Internet usage in mobile phones and social media site usage by mobile channels.

This trend has several implications for both mobile and social media marketing. These are:

• Number of mobile Internet users is growing, so marketers must learn to leverage the mobile channel for advertising in addition to their on-line advertising spend.
• With the emergence of mobile channel, marketers must learn to provide optimized content to mobile users. More and more organizations are creating mobile friendly pages that are optimized for mobile viewing with non java script pages and device specific pages.
• The ability to tie mobile users with on-line and offline user profiles to better understand mobile user behavior.
• Location-based programs can also be used in other contexts to help marketers target social network users with relevant information and offers. Location-based networks such as Loopt and Foursquare link people, places and interests and allow geo-targeted delivery of offers. Location based networks are getting popular with mobile and social media marketing as they provide a valuable targeting mechanism and localized marketing is becoming more and more relevant with mobile channel.
• Lastly, the ability to tie all of the user activity via mobile networks and social media along with online and offline activity is critical to develop the holistic view for customer intelligence and insights.