By Rex
Here at [INSERT NEW NAME HERE 
], we spend a lot of our time talking about social networking and mobile marketing. But rarely do we use both terms in the same context. The proliferation of mobile devices around the globe is occurring at a staggering pace. According to the popular tech blog Engadget, there are currently about 3.3 billion mobile phone subscribers. Compare that to approximately 1.3 billion users of the Internet worldwide (according to Internet World Stats). To put this into perspective, in Internet-deprived parts of the world, such as Africa, you may see few personal computers but are very likely to observe many people using cell phones.
The world of tomorrow is likely to connect us all via phones and increasingly smart mobile devices such as Blackberries and iPhones. According to a recent study from eMarketer, over 800 million people worldwide will access social networks via their mobile phones by 2012 — up from 82 million in 2007. As for those 82 million folks that are already social networking on their mobile devices, the accompanying chart illustrates just how they’re doing it.
Of course, in the future, calling and e-mailing people will hardly be the only choices available to users of mobile networks. The iPhone “revolution” is boosting sales of smart mobile devices, as more service providers and users realize the benefits of having the Internet in their pocket. These devices are erasing the boundaries that formerly existed between browsing the Internet on your PC and on a phone. In fact mobile devices will soon supplant personal computers as the dominant Internet platform.
From the eMarketer study:
“Although the total mobile social network user base in 2012 will be under 20 percent of the worldwide mobile user population, it is likely that these users will have a disproportionate impact on marketing, media and mobile communications because creating and sharing digital content (user-generated and professional) forms much of the social networking experience.”
As digital strategists, we are still trying to determine which of our methods and techniques will be relevant for the mobile environment and how we will use them to pinpoint our audience. Once the mobile social networks come into play, the opportunities will become more defined, from audience and targeting perspectives. Of course, until then, experimenting is still the name of the game. And while we don’t yet know the major platform of tomorrow (see our post on Twitter from back in March), it is clear that mobile social networking is something that we need to pay close attention to today.