Monday 26 August 2013

The Importance of Having a Mobile Website

The amount of time and money people are spending on mobile devices is growing rapidly and yet many businesses don't have a website optimized for mobile — at what cost? Think back on your past 24 hours. How much time did you spend on your smartphone? Were you mostly texting, reading news, checking social media, or were you actually talking to another human?

Device vs Desktop traffic has risen over the past year, as shown in the graph below. Mobile to overtake fixed Internet access by 2014” was the big headline from the widely shared infographic summarising the bold prediction from 2008 by Mary Meeker, an analyst at Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers. By June of this year, Device traffic had risen to 10% from last years' stats, and according to experts, it is still rising. 

Yet many businesses have not yet optimized their websites for mobile, frustrating visitors with tricky navigation and slow loading times (i.e Blackberry - which is still a major and affordable brand in many countries around the world). Jesse Haines, group marketing manager for GoogleMobile Ads, told Mashable that a survey of major advertisers in early 2011 showed only 21% had launched a mobile-friendly site. A 2012 L2 study of the top 100 fashion, beauty, retail, hospitality, and watch and jewelry brands found that only two-thirds had mobile-optimized sites, and yet a third of those did not allow consumers to shop from their sites.

If you're in the business of e-commerce, those figures should help you benchmark what you're already losing, but a recent survey from Google underlines the damage you might also be doing to your brand by not having your site optimized for mobile.
  • Mobile sites lead to mobile purchases. This is a no-brainer: Shoppers are more likely to buy a product or service if your site is optimized for mobile. Three-fourths said they are more likely to return to a site in the future if the experience on mobile is good.
  • If your site isn't optimized for mobile, shoppers will go elsewhere. The majority of participants in the survey said that if they can't find what they're looking for on your site, they'll sooner seek out a competitor's mobile-friendly site instead of switching to a PC to revisit yours.
  • A bad mobile experience can damage a company's brand. A bad mobile experience can create bad feelings about your company. Nearly half of participants in the survey said they feel frustrated and annoyed when they happen across a site that's not mobile-friendly, and that it makes them feel like a company doesn't care about their business. More than half said a poor mobile experience makes them less likely to engage with a company in the future.


    Here are the key reasons why your business should have a mobile website:
    1. Google indexes mobile content differently than regular search. Ranking on mobile is easier because Google has a much smaller index of content under mobile, as this segment is still in its infancy.
    2. According to a study on CNN this year, the average person spends an hour on mobile every day. As the percentage of mobile web users increases rapidly, you should not miss the opportunity to capture this audience and preempt the competition.
    3. 20% of all U.S. households are now “mobile-only” for their phone service. Even Google’s ex CEO Eric Schmidt has said “The Future is in Mobile Search”. The next frontier of the internet is the mobile web and some say it will even overtake the desktop. In the near future, most of the visitors to a website will be through mobile. Mobile devices such as the iPhone and Android have revolutionized web surfing, enhanced the experience dramatically, and continue to drive more consumers to use mobile devices for browsing the Internet.

    Red Hot Web Designs is running a special! If you do not have a mobisite yet, they will design one for free with every purchase of a new SEO website! www.redhotwebdesigns.co.za




    https://www.facebook.com/itwww
    https://plus.google.com/u/0/104137192617246546372/posts   https://twitter.com/InTouchWWW http://www.youtube.com/user/intouchwiththeworld




    2013-ITWWW-Odette Nieuwoudt

Monday 19 August 2013

Facebook Reveals Most Users Are Mobile


A new level of transparency from Facebook will help the world see whether its mobile growth is entirely propped up by international users that don’t earn the company as much money. Today Facebook announced it will start sharing country-by-country web and mobile monthly and daily user counts. Facebook’s 101 million US daily mobile users make up a whopping 78% of its 128 million daily US users.
Facebook’s global mobile daily active user count increased 10.3% from 425 million to 469 million from Q1 to Q2 2013. But how much of that growth was in its high-monetizing first-world markets? And how much was in its emerging international markets where more people are on feature phones and it earns less per user? Before we couldn’t tell. Soon we’ll be able to.
In a statement, Facebook said:
“We are doing this because we believe brands and businesses should think differently about how people engage with Facebook, especially on mobile. A lot of people focus on monthly active users or even registered users to demonstrate their size and scale. We think this is becoming on old way of looking at the media world. In this world, understanding who comes back at least once a month is only part of the picture. Instead, businesses should focus on people who come back online every single day.”
Facebook says it will soon start revealing user counts for other countries beyond the US and UK once teams in each country are ready. To be clear, total stats count each individual user as 1 regardless of whether they accessed from desktop, mobile, or both. Mobile stats count each user who accessed via mobile, whether or not they also accessed via desktop.
The data will certainly be helpful for advertisers trying to figure out which international markets they should be focusing their efforts on. Salesforce CMO and Buddy Media CEO until it was acquired) Michael Lazerow says “What we’re seeing in these numbers is Facebook’s ‘mobile first’ strategy has really paid dividends. This is an important update that should help advertisers to plan and target their campaigns more effectively.”
But for the rest of the world, this transparency provides a much better understanding of where Facebook’s business is headed.

HOW INTERNATIONAL IS FACEBOOK?

Previously, Facebook had only shared its combined web and mobile user counts by region, and its mobile user counts as global totals. This made it tough to tell where exactly its mobile growth was coming from. Here you’ll see the Facebook Q2 2013 total user counts at the top, which offered breakdowns by region but not by country. Below that you’ll see the daily mobile user counts, which aren’t broken down by geography at all.


The reason that’s a problem is that all users are not created equal when it comes to Facebook’s business. In Q2 2013, Facebook said it made $1.60 in average revenue per user (ARPU) per year as a global average. But in the Rest Of World region that includes its fast-growing developing markets like India and Brazil, it only makes $0.63 per user while it earns $4.32 ARPU per year in the US & Canada region. That means every user it added in the Rest Of World market was worth less than 1/6th of what it makes per North American user.
That’s why back in May during Q1 2013 earnings coverage and again last month I requested that Facebook provide mobile user counts by geography. Soon we’ll have the data, and the little released today is already enlightening. For example, 78.9% of Facebook’s daily American users are on mobile, and in the UK 83% of daily users are on mobile. We can also tell that 71.5% of monthly US Facebook users come back every day, while in the UK Facebook has a “stickiness” of 72.7%.
The real juicy insights will come once we’ve had this data for a few quarters. In the short term, stats on Facebook’s fastest growing international markets and most critical first-world markets will be eye-openers. They’ll reveal whether Facebook is still growing its mobile presence in developed countries, or if it’s reached saturation there.
If Facebook has run out of rich first-world people to sign up, it may need to concentrate more on squeezing dimes out of the developing world by increasing ad salesperson presence and getting more local game companies onboard.
For now, though, the social network should be proud that it’s surviving the shift to mobile that many thought would be its demise. The company swallowed its pride, admitted it had made mistakes designing for desktop first and building apps on HTML5, and righted the course. Now it’s not only surviving, but thriving on mobile. With 41% of ad revenue coming from small screens and more than 3/4ths of daily users in it homeland visiting via phones and tablets, Facebook’s “mobile-first” strategy seems to be a success.

https://www.facebook.com/itwww
https://plus.google.com/u/0/104137192617246546372/posts   https://twitter.com/InTouchWWW http://www.youtube.com/user/intouchwiththeworld




2013-ITWWW

Monday 12 August 2013

Social Media Tools: How to Simplify Your Social Media Marketing

Are you looking for a better way to manage your social activities?
Are you wondering what tools can help your social media marketing?
To discover free or low-cost tools to simplify your social media marketing, Social Media Examiner interviewed Ian Cleary.

Social Media Tools

How did you become interested in social media tools?
Ian explains how his history working for software companies and his very strong technology background led him to social media.
When he started to look at all of the key influencers around social media, he soon realized the social media tools niche was perfect because nobody owned that space.
Why you should look beyond Google Analytics and Facebook Insights data:
Ian states that although Google Analytics is useful, it doesn't track things such as what’s happening on social media related to Twitter or LinkedIn, and the Facebook analytics tool is a little too complicated for many people.
One free tool that Ian recommends is LikeAlyzer, which is a very simple Facebook analytics tool.
It evaluates your Facebook Page and will give you a score out of 100. You’ll then receive some basic recommendations on what to improve.
Tools to help marketers keep up with news and content they may want to share:
Ian explains why there is a lot of activity in this area. The two tools that Ian likes to use on a day-to-day basis are Feedly and Scoop.it.
Feedly is a website that allows you to read a selection of posts from any blogs you subscribe to. When you log in, you will see the latest posts. It has a really nice user interface.
You can access the content through the web and your mobile device. It also integrates with Buffer app. You’ll discover how this can help you with your social media workflow.
Another advantage of Feedly is you can group the sites you subscribe to. The integration of Feedly and Buffer saves marketers a lot of time.
Another tool to help you discover content is Scoop.it. You can follow people on Scoop.it to find relevant content. You can then add this content to one of your boards.
It’s not only a great way to find content, but also for others to help create it for you.
Scoop.it is similar to Feedly in terms of the collection of content, except it’s based around people who pick the content for you. You’ll discover how to find the right people to follow and the most popular boards around your niche.
Ian uses a tool within Facebook called Post Planner. It shows you trending content and what’s been shared the most. You can then select content and add it to your Facebook Page.
What free or paid tools would you recommend to help marketers get a good feel for their overall social activities across all channels?
One of the tools that Ian uses is Mention.net. There is a free section and a paid section. Ian advises you to start off with the free section. Mention.net monitors the mentions of keywords across the web, which could be your brand name or product name.
It picks up mentions in blog posts, forums, Twitter and Facebook. When you go into this tool, you can see when someone mentioned your brand within a Facebook Page or blog. You can also get email alerts.
It’s a really powerful tool to have and essential for a marketer to be able to track what’s going on.
You’ll learn about what’s included for free and when you might need to upgrade.
You’ll discover the difference between Mention.net and Google Alerts and why you’ll have to replace your Google Alerts with something else.
You can replace Google Alerts with Talkwalker Alerts. It’s free, but it doesn’t do Facebook or Twitter alerts.
Tools that support sentiment analysis can be quite expensive.  You’ll hear about the social media management tool Viralheat that is not that expensive but it supports sentiment analysis.
Ian believes that although people don’t want to have a dozen tools on their desktop, at present they have no choice. However, there’s a tool to watch called SumAll which aims to bring all of the analytics under one platform.
Tips on how to make better use of Google Analytics 
Ian says that Google Analytics is brilliant and sometimes we forget how good it is. You need to set up goals and spend time with it. If you don’t have any goals within Google Analytics, you’re missing out.
For example, you could set up a goal to track when someone signs up to your email database through your website or when someone signs up for a trial of your product.
With Google Analytics, you can break it down further when you want to find out how many people came to your site and how many converted. Google Analytics shows you how many conversions came from Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
It’s a great way to learn which is the most beneficial piece of social activity and what platform you should work on.
You’ll hear how we do this at Social Media Examiner and what social platform outperformed the others. It’s definitely worth a look, as traffic sources alone aren’t sufficient.
There’s a lot of data in Google Analytics and it can sometimes be too much. Ian recommends building custom dashboards to pick out the most interesting pieces of information relevant to your business.
There are sites online that have dashboards already created, that you can just add to your own analytics.


https://www.facebook.com/itwww
https://plus.google.com/u/0/104137192617246546372/posts   https://twitter.com/InTouchWWW http://www.youtube.com/user/intouchwiththeworld



2013-ITWWW

Monday 5 August 2013

Objectives and Importance of Advertising

Objectives and Importance of Advertising


Advertising is the best way to communicate to the customers. Advertising helps informs the customers about the brands available in the market and the variety of products useful to them. Advertising is for everybody including kids, young and old. It is done using various media types, with different techniques and methods most suited.
Let us take a look on the main objectives and importance of advertising.
Objectives of Advertising
Four main Objectives of advertising are:
i. Trial
ii. Continuity
iii. Brand switch
iv. Switching back

Let’s take a look on these various types of objectives.
1. Trial: the companies which are in their introduction stage generally work for this objective. The trial objective is the one which involves convincing the customers to buy the new product introduced in the market. Here, the advertisers use flashy and attractive ads to make customers take a look on the products and purchase for trials.

2. Continuity: this objective is concerned about keeping the existing customers to stick on to the product. The advertisers here generally keep on bringing something new in the product and the advertisement so that the existing customers keep buying their products.

3. Brand switch: this objective is basically for those companies who want to attract the customers of the competitors. Here, the advertisers try to convince the customers to switch from the existing brand they are using to their product.

4. Switching back: this objective is for the companies who want their previous customers back, who have switched to their competitors. The advertisers use different ways to attract the customers back like discount sale, new advertise, some reworking done on packaging, etc.
Basically, advertising is a very artistic way of communicating with the customers. The main characteristics one should have to get on their objectives are great communication skills and very good convincing power.


Importance of Advertising

Advertising plays a very important role in today’s age of competition. Advertising is one thing which has become a necessity for everybody in today’s day to day life, be it the producer, the traders, or the customer. Advertising is an important part. Lets have a look on how and where is advertising important:

1. Advertising is important for the customers
Just imagine television or a newspaper or a radio channel without an advertisement! No, no one can any day imagine this. Advertising plays a very important role in customers life. Customers are the people who buy the product only after they are made aware of the products available in the market. If the product is not advertised, no customer will come to know what products are available and will not buy the product even if the product was for their benefit. One more thing is that advertising helps people find the best products for themselves, their kids, and their family. When they come to know about the range of products, they are able to compare the products and buy so that they get what they desire after spending their valuable money. Thus, advertising is important for the customers.

2. Advertising is important for the seller and companies producing the products
Yes, advertising plays very important role for the producers and the sellers of the products, because
- Advertising helps increasing sales
- Advertising helps producers or the companies to know their competitors and plan accordingly to meet up the level of competition.
- If any company wants to introduce or launch a new product in the market, advertising will make a ground for the product. Advertising helps making people aware of the new product so that the consumers come and try the product.
- Advertising helps creating goodwill for the company and gains customer loyalty after reaching a mature age.
- The demand for the product keeps on coming with the help of advertising and demand and supply become a never ending process.

3. Advertising is important for the society
Advertising helps educating people. There are some social issues also which advertising deals with like child labour, liquor consumption, girl child killing, smoking, family planning education, etc. thus, advertising plays a very important role in society.





https://www.facebook.com/itwww
https://plus.google.com/u/0/104137192617246546372/posts   https://twitter.com/InTouchWWW http://www.youtube.com/user/intouchwiththeworld



2013-ITWWW