TechCrunch recently reported, in an effort to increase transparency, Facebook has announced that it will begin sharing its mobile user counts for daily and monthly use.
This, Facebook hopes, will help businesses and brands think different about how their followers engage with Facebook. These statistics will be sorted by country, but are currently only available for the North American and UK markets.
Businesses that have been hesitant to engage in mobile advertising may now be more willing to launch mobile advertising campaigns to reach out to the users of mobile devices. Rather than the monthly statistics, most people will be interested in the daily statistics.
Mobile vs. Desktop Users
Facebook touts 101 million daily mobile users in the United States, and these mobile users make up 78 percent of the total daily users in the U.S., which rings in at 128 million. In the UK, the mobile users make up 83%, or 20 million of the 24 million daily UK users.
More than 13 million Canadians access the platform from a mobile device at least once per month, while 9.4 million of those log on daily. Each individual user is counted as a single user and will show in the daily count for mobile statistics when logging on from a mobile device, regardless of whether or not that person logged in on desktop as well.
How This Will Help Businesses
In developed countries at least, mobile usage exceeds desktop usage. For businesses, this means that they’ll be able to create better campaigns once they find out how much of their target market accesses the platform via mobile devices.
In other words, Facebook wants businesses to spend more money marketing on their networks, and they want these businesses to know that they should be targeting mobile users, especially those that visit the site every day via their mobile devices.
The daily mobile statistics are expected to provide businesses with greater incentives to gear their ads toward mobile users, a risk that some businesses have been unwilling to take because of the perceived intrusiveness.
How the Data Could Be Improved
Social strategist Andrew Jennings tells Marketing Week that it would be useful for Facebook to include more data along with the mobile statistics, such as which activities users are engaged in when they log in and what times they’re logging in.
This could help businesses with both outbound and inbound marketing to target their ads toward those activities, resulting in a greater success for mobile advertising campaigns.
Increased Ads Have Not Decreased Usage
From the user point of view, there have been complaints about the increase in ads on Facebook, but these complaints have not resulted in a decrease in usage.
A YouGov SixSense report from May 2013 claimed otherwise, stating that Facebook usage was down nine percent in the UK from April 2012 to April 2013 because users were annoyed with the ad increase.
Still, numbers don’t lie, or so they say, and the number of Facebook users from all devices staggeringly outnumbers the users for all other social networks.
These new mobile statistics will enable increased granulation of marketing efforts, as well as provide new information to businesses about how Facebook is used.
Do you know someone interested in mobile marketing? Share this post with them and ask them what they think of Facebook’s move to release mobile user data!
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About the Author: Alicia Lawrence is a content coordinator for WebpageFX and blogs in her free time at MarCom Land. Her work has been published by the Association for Business Communication, Yahoo! Small Business, and Spin Sucks. Connect with Alicia on Google+!