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The Value Of A Facebook-Connected Mobile User (Facebook)
A recent Facebook blog post states that people who sign up for mobile apps via their Facebook login tend to spend more time and money on mobile apps. And they also come back more often. This suggests that the socially connected user is a more valuable user. Here are some of the game developer stats Facebook shared in its latest post:
There are more examples in the post. Facebook also offers best practices such as making sure your business intelligence solutions can track users who connect with Facebook to track their retention, monetization and virals.
Will Facebook Messenger Kill Off The Phone Number? (Forbes)
With the news that Facebook launched a feature enabling voice messages through its Messenger app, we may not be far from a world where you can talk to almost anyone, anywhere, without dialing a phone number. While Facebook Messenger is hardly the only voice service available, the massive global Facebook user base makes it the first with the potential for truly mainstream adoption on a global scale. Make no mistake: the way people use phone numbers is changing drastically and the previous concept of how they use them is circling the drain. After all, it wasn’t that long ago when mobile phone numbers outranked landlines. We can speculate about what comes next, but one thing is already clear: it’s only a matter of time and these changes will take place sooner than you think.
Twitter Ads: Are You Wasting Money on Mobile? (Search Engine Watch)
Advertising on Twitter can be a great opportunity to drive online sales. But to reap the benefits you must understand how to test and optimize the channel. One of the targeting options for Twitter advertising campaigns is device targeting. Most direct marketing campaigns include a call to action with the goal of a form completion on the landing page. A recent desktop vs. mobile device experiment revealed some interesting results:
- Targeting mobile devices results in a 60 percent lower conversion rate and a 160 percent increase in cost per acquisition.
- Targeting desktop devices doubles the cost per engagement but only results in half the engagement rate.
- Users on desktop devices have a higher click-to-visit ratio than mobile device users. If a user on a desktop device clicks on the tweet, they are more likely to visit the landing page than a user on a mobile device.
- Users on a desktop device have more than double the conversion rate of a visit to a lead than mobile device users.
According to this, on Twitter, targeting desktop devices is more efficient than targeting mobile devices when striving for the lowest cost per acquisition.
Walmart Is Going All Out With Mobile (CNet)
Data is increasingly coming from mobile devices. The challenges facing brick-and-mortar stores are only growing as online shopping moves from the desktop to smartphones. People look up prices online while they're inside a store. They make purchases from an online store unconnected to the store at which they're roaming the aisles. The list goes on. This is why Walmart, a company known far more for its data mining and supply chain mastery than for its mobile apps, is going all out with mobile. Walmart's apps cater to people who are first and foremost shopping inside a Walmart store. Walmart expects 40 percent of its online traffic this holiday season to come from mobile, much of that from people shopping on their phones while they're inside one of its 4,000 stores.
Mobile Drives Samsung Earnings (The Verge)
Samsung announced consolidated operating profit of 8.84 trillion won (approximately $8.27 billion) for the fourth quarter of 2012 on 56.06 trillion won (roughly $52.45 billion) in revenue. The profit represents an increase of 10 percent over the previous quarter and 89.3 percent increase over the same time last year. The operating profit for 2012 overall came in at 29.05 trillion won ($27.18 billion) on revenue of 201.10 trillion won ($188.14 billion). Unsurprisingly, Samsung's mobile business played an integral role in its financial performance. Samsung Mobile Communications grew 4 percent over the previous quarter; the company cited the robust sales of the Galaxy S III and the Galaxy Note II as the key drivers in its smartphone performance.
Google Looks To Create Its Own Wireless Network (WSJ via BGR)
The Wall Street Journal reports that Google "is trying to create an experimental wireless network covering its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters" that "could portend the creation of dense and super fast Google wireless networks in other locations that would allow people to connect to the Web using their mobile devices." But before anyone gets too excited about "Google Wireless" coming to their neighborhoods, the Journal notes that documents Google filed with the Federal Communications Commission show that the network will "use frequencies that wouldn’t be compatible with nearly any of the consumer mobile devices that exist today." So for now it looks as though Google’s wireless network is still squarely in the experimental phase and won’t be rolling out across the country anytime soon.
Location-Based Services Are Transforming The Mobile Industry (BI Intelligence)
The possibilities for location-based services on mobile go beyond consumer-facing apps like Foursquare and Shopkick. With over 770 million GPS-enabled smartphones, location data has begun to permeate the entire mobile space. It's powering advertisements, and many other services — from weather to travel apps. In a new report from BI Intelligence on location-based data, we analyze the opportunities emerging from this new local-mobile paradigm, examine how location-enabled mobile ads have generated excitement, look at how location-based features have boosted engagement for apps, explain how local data can connect hundreds of thousands of small and medium-sized businesses to the mobile economy, and demystify some of the underlying technologies and privacy issues.
How Mobile Operators Can Capture, Retain And Grow Subscribers (comScore)
Device proliferation has occurred and continues at a rapid pace. This environment is filled with new opportunities and struggles for mobile operators who must stay competitive to gain market share and increase revenues. Finding out more about the need for digital data enrichment and how insights from subscriber big data can help mobile operators to:
- Improve customer satisfaction by accurately sizing tariff plans based on subscriber usage.
- Provide the best and most relevant devices for customer lifestyles.
- Properly incentivize subscribers to renew with customized proposals.
- Select the next best applications, services, and devices.
Marketing leaders are hungry for a solution that can transform their vast amounts of digital subscriber data into insights to drive subscriber capture, retention and growth. Check out the white paper from comScore.
Developing A Winning Mobile Marketing Campaign (Internet Marketing Grind)
With mobile there is an abundance of traffic out there and a number of affiliate offers you can promote simply by direct linking. Your only challenge is matching the right traffic with the right offer. Prior to buying mobile traffic you must understand how it is different than desktop advertising, how your ads are being delivered, and what you should be looking for when running your offers. Not all mobile advertisements are delivered the same. With traditional desktop advertising we have the standard IAB banner sizes and the annoying pop-up/pop-under units. Mobile is developing so rapidly many companies are taking the initiative to be unique offering ad units inside applications, on traditional mobile formatted websites, and even websites that have a responsive design. Mobile advertising is a medium that’s going to continue to explode over the next couple of years. As more people begin to access the Internet through their smartphones, advertisers are going to have several unique opportunities to take advantage of this abundance of traffic and monetize it accordingly.
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