Mobile Websites - Discover the 7th Mass Media Before Your Competition4604240
The purpose of this short article is to explore the massive growth of mobile internet usage and why every business large or small simply must have a mobile website.
The fact is there are now more mobile internet devices than PC internet connections. 29% of users only access the internet via their mobiles. If your customers can't see your website properly on their mobile devices they will just click onto one of your customer's site that is already mobile optimised.
Mobile is the 7th Mass Media
The term "7th Mass Media" was coined by industry expert Tony Ahonen
The very first mass media was Books which have been around since the 1500's Recordings occurred at the turn of the 20th century In 1910 the 3rd mass media, Cinema brought us stars like Charlie Chaplin 10 short years later in the 1920's saw the advert of Radio The next mass media to affect the world was within the 50's with Television It wasn't for a further 40 years, taking us into the 1990 that the next mass media arrived - The Internet , with Google coming along later within the century The 7th mass media in the 2000 being the Mobile Phone. And what a development we have seen from those earlier chucky phones that looked like bricks to the intelligent smart phones we have today.
What Does This All Mean For Your Business?
The importance of the mobile is it basically replaces all of the previous 6 mass Medias.
Records, well we are able to listen to music on our mobile phones Radio, we are able to listen to radio on our mobile phones, and we now have pod casts too We are able to receive Newspapers and magazines onto our mobile phones now TV is watched on smart phone. And we are actually seeing the first subscriptions programme for on demand movies, and of course it goes to mention that anything we do on the internet we can do on their mobile phones. And if you are thinking there are some things that won't ever get transferred across towards the mobile phone, i.e. books, well we have already see them migrate across to the likes of Kindle, and in Japan the mobile phone book industry is worth half a billion dollars a year
The Mobile Phone Has 8 Unique Abilities
It is the first truly personal medium, which means 63% of us won't even share our mobiles with our spouse We have our mobile phone almost everywhere. Indeed 60 % of people take them to bed with us A mobile is always on!! It's has an in-built payment mechanism. Actually some gaming and chat TV channels earn the majority of the revenues from mobile payments A mobile is constantly available, and with its built in microphone, camera and video we can create content at any time. This allows for massive creativity wherever we happen to be. Mobile has by far the most accurate audience data. Fact is 90% of the audience on mobile can be identified Mobile captures the social context of media consumption. How many of us check in on those location based apps, or tweet a message saying we are having coffee with friends Mobiles enable augmented reality which you will think of by way of the visual overlay in Arnie's terminator movie
Don't be fooled by thinking the mobile is small and has limitations, nowadays many mobile phones use a qwerty keyboard, video cameras, microphone, bar code scanners, motion sensor which can be used for gaming, and GPS which can be used for navigation, which can even replace the sat nav's we have in our cars.
What's the significance of all of this?
In 2002 the Americans said that the mobile phone was the least important of the 4 main technologies, behind the internet, television and the landline phone, as the most important technologies they use.
Just 5 short years later in 2007 they said the mobile phone was the number one device they could not live without.
Statistics
29% of all internet access comes from just Mobile, compared to only 18% coming via a pc. 53% of people browsing use both. That means 82% of all people search via mobile devices. That is a phenomenal statistic, and unless your business is set up with a mobile optimised website, you will be left behind.
Local search volume" is growing at an amazing rate, 50% year on year. From1billion local searches in 2009 to an estimated 3.45 billion local searches in 2012.
80% of people research online before purchasing, even when they purchase offline.
Mobile browsers accounts for 20.7 million searches per month and is the number one method to find local information.
Why your business must go mobile with a mobilised website
Current estimates show...that there are approximately 124 billion websites on the internet today, while the number of mobile websites is only around the 10 million mark...10 million = 0.008% of total websites. That is like Citrus Park, in Florida which has a population of 25,000 having a mobile website and nowhere else in the whole of the USA having one.
I'm sure you would agree Goggle is a world leader, they know where it's at, yes.
Well this is what Google Thinks of Mobile. In February 2010 at the Mobile World Congress, Google CEO Eric Schmidt confirmed... That Google will be adopting a 'Mobile First' policy
Conclusion
There is a big opportunity right now for those companies that take the imitative and obtain themselves a mobile website . It doesn't matter if your customers are looking for you through local search, whether they are looking through organic search, whether they are searching through the paid for listings, for instance PPC ads or even through the numerous video channels such as YouTube.
A normal website cannot be viewed satisfactorily on a mobile device, so to maintain a positive experience for your customers you need to get mobilised. The Truth is, that the early adopters of websites that work on mobile phones will have a huge advantage, especially small, local businesses.
Remember what Google's CEO Eric Schmidt said "Mobile First" .
