Social Networking Usurping Mobile Messaging As Communications Tool

Published on: 31st March 2009

Openwave Systems has published a report highlighting key mobile internet usage trends in North America, based on findings derived from its Mobile Analytics product. Strong themes that Mobile Analytics uncovered included upticks in social networking site usage suggestive of a new preferred method of communication with the potential to unseat traditional forms of messaging such as email for a particular segment of subscribers; an analysis of mobile advertising click-through rates (CTR) that showed clear advantages of targeted promotions; and the growing trend in accessing mobile classifieds via the mobile device.

Openwave's findings were derived from an anonymous sample of actual customer logs from a Tier 1 North American operator that were processed through Openwave Mobile Analytics.

Social networking remains the number one area of interest to mobile internet users with Facebook and MySpace being the top two search terms on both Google and Yahoo! OneSearch. In terms of average hits per session, MySpace leads Facebook by nearly 46 percent, suggesting that MySpace could become the preferred choice of mobile communication for a particular segment of an operator subscriber base and displace some of the most frequently used email offerings. The social networking trend presents a unique opportunity for operators to partner with these leading social networking sites through co-branding efforts with a view to generating incremental revenues from messaging generated from the social networking sites.

Mobile Advertising - Targeting Improves Click-Through Rate

Regarding mobile advertising, Openwave found that while AdMob served the most ads (nearly 7 times more than the nearest competitor), it also had the lower click through rate in comparison to Buzzcity and Microsoft. AdMob's lower CTR could be the result of generic ads that are not targeted or relevant to the subscriber. Operators can play a vital role in the mobile advertising value chain by providing aggregated data on subscriber behaviour and preferences to ad networks, which could result in better targeting of subscribers that could lead to high eCPM rates and better results for publishers, advertisers, operators and ultimately the subscribers.

Mobile Access to Classified Advertising is a Key Growth Area

Openwave Mobile Analytics also uncovered that Craigslist ranked number 7 within the top 10 search terms on Google, suggesting a trend towards mobile classifieds for jobs, housing, bargain priced goods and services during the current economic downturn. Using information collected from Mobile Analytics, operators can provide similar classified services to registered users based on their unique subscriber profiles.

"Subscriber data has always been part of an operator's asset base, however extracting this information and transforming it to gain subscriber insight has been lacking," said Dan Nguyen, vice president of product management and product marketing, Openwave. "In the current economic climate, better subscriber information and deep subscriber insight may help operators retain and gain customers. Openwave Mobile Analytics can provide operators invaluable insight to better understand and confidently predict user behavior patterns, as well as position themselves as important players in the mobile value chain."

 

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