CHART: Here's How Mobile Social Networks Have Become
Social networks like Facebook and Twitter are daily destinations for millions of consumers. Increasingly, their ad products offer targeting according to specific demographics, social connections, interests, and habits.
At the same time, mobile usage is exploding. Advertisers' desire for guaranteed attention, coupled with this explosion, helps to explain social media's move away from traditional display ads — like Facebook's right-rail ads — and toward so-called native ads that surface in a user's stream, either as a tweet or a Facebook post.
In a recent report from BI Intelligence, we analyze the state of social media advertising and detail how mobile is an important part of this story as mobile-friendly as native ad formats fuel growth in the market.
We specifically provide a comprehensive guide and examination of the advertising ecosystems on Facebook and Twitter, as well as a primer on Tumblr as an emerging ad medium.
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Take a look at this chart that details how mobile social networks have become:
Overall, mobile accounts for just under 40% of time spent on social media. Both Twitter and Facebook have passed the 50% mobile usage mark and, given the continued growth of mobile devices, it will only rise.
Mobile accounted for 11% of Facebook's ad revenue last year even though it didn't release mobile ads until the tail end of the second quarter. By the fourth quarter, it was up to 23%. Twitter reported that its mobile ad revenue now regularly outpaces its desktop ad revenue.
Given the easy transferability of in-stream ads to mobile, it seems likely that mobile as a percentage of social ad revenue will track usage patterns fairly closely. In fact, social ads on mobile may be what helps push the mobile ad market over the top.
What's more, it seems that social ads on mobile may be more effective than their desktop counterparts. According to social ad optimization platform TBG, Facebook's mobile ads have the highest click-through rates by a substantial margin.