LinkedIn is anticipating its “mobile moment”, with the social platform expecting to have more than 50%of its global traffic coming through mobile devices this year. The same trend is expected in the Australian market and, LinkedIn marketing insights analyst Ben Russell has called on brands to be “more thoughtful” when marketing on mobile.
Despite the noise around the growth in mobile, brands are far from cracking it. Speaking at Social Media Week, Russell said that when it comes to marketing on mobile devices, brands often just copy their desktop experience. But he said with 79% of LinkedIn users owning a tablet and 94% owning a smartphone, marketers need to shift their thinking and look at mobile as its own strategy.
“If over 50% of our traffic is going to be coming through mobile devices - not just on linked in, this would be across all social platforms - we’ve got to not just be mobile ready, mobile optimised and not even mobile first, but experience-first,” Russell said.
“We’ve got to invest into the mobile experience, the desktop experience as separate entities. We can’t just wrap something around the desktop experience, slap it on mobile and expect that to work, it just doesn’t work in that way.”
Speaking on the same panel, Salesforce principal social architect Eddie Cliff said the integration of social within a brand's campaign is often a key difference between the more mature US market and Australia.
He said a problem Australian brands have is they often silo social media or place it under control of a marketing intern, rather than making it a priority and integrating it into the “customer journey”.
Cliff added that it can be difficult to quantify the mobile and social experience, but that its value can come from allowing brands to expand reach beyond the current audience base.
The Works creative partner and director Douglas Nicol agreed, adding that brands need to stop judging social media by ROI output.
“I think when you start thinking like that you get to that next level rather than trying micromanage and micro-justify every component,” Nicol said.
“I think that a sign of maturity in a client and in a brand is when they stop asking 'what does Twitter deliver?' and they start to say ‘our job is to sell a product and social is one part of a number of amazing things that have to happen to get that sale'.”
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