I recently saw these stats on when Facebook users are most active. (For those of you that are afraid to click on mysterious links, I’ll share with you what the study says.) It says that most of the traffic on Facebook happens during work hours. (For those of you that think Facebook is for teens just know that the fastest growing group on Facebook for the past year and half has been 55 an over women. AND 2/3 of all of those accessing social networks are between the ages of 25-55; split evenly down the middle.) I also recently saw some statistics about Facebook mobile usages that shows Facebook has gone from 11 million users to 28 million users from 1.2009 to 1.2010 with the remainder of the ~125 million accessing Facebook from their mobile application. (For those of you that are lucky enough to have social sites such as Facebook, Twitter, etc blocked by your company AND don’t have a smartphone; now you have a completely reasonable excuse to buy one this Holiday season.)
What does this mean if your an online retailer? It means that there are three trends at work here that demand you create a mobile optimized site now.
- At this time last year there was a 20% increase in business blocking social sites. So people are taking to their smartphones to access social sites (see stats above). If they’re on their mobile device, doing things unrelated to business, I’d guess they’re more likely to shop from their phone if they’re going to be shopping. (Also more likely if they think they’re boss is watching.)
- People are getting very comfortable with mobile commerce. Amazon generated $1 billion in mCommerce last year.
- Social commerce is on the rise! What’s social commerce you ask? Here’s one example: Jane sees a product that she knows John and some of his friends will want. She ‘Facebook Likes’ the product and adds a comment specifically to John and his friends. John sees it and clicks through and buys the product.
(For those retailers that don’t think your target market are those that have smartphones or on social networks just know that roughly half off all of the US is on Facebook with the remaining 70% of members living outside of the US. AND in 4 years there will be more smartphones than PCs.)
Okay. I’ll stop now.
