Tag: social media marketing

This is causing the smartphone based social media marketing revenue at the company to spike.

Facebook has been making a concerted effort to improve the experience that it provides to the users of mobile devices, and based on the ad revenues that it is generating through its social media marketing business, it looks as though those efforts are paying off.

Over half a billion Facebook users currently access their accounts exclusively over smartphones and tablets.

Facebook recently released that data as a component of its earnings presentation. By the close of last year, that social network recorded 1.19 billion active monthly users over mobile devices. This represented an increase of 26 percent over the figure that was recorded at the end of 2013. This tremendous rise in mobile traffic has meant that Facebook has also been able to bring in considerably greater earnings over mobile focused social media marketing ads.

The ad revenue generated from mobile devices makes up the majority of Facebook’s marketing income.

The company reported that the last quarter of 2014 brought in $3.59 billion in overall advertising revenue. Of that, 69 percent came from mobile ads, with the remainder being generated from the desktop and laptop side of things. This means that almost $2.5 billion was brought in through mobile ads, alone, in a period of three months. Year over year, that represented an improvement of 53 percent. It also proved to be the first quarter in which the mobile advertising revenue at Facebook broke the $2 billion level.

This type of healthy mobile marketing figures are critical to businesses such as Facebook, that have business models that are based on advertising. While internet users continue to use their browsing on laptops and desktops – and their banner ads – to smartphones and tablets – with their apps and mobile browsers that require different forms of advertising than the traditional types.

This has required Facebook – and other businesses hoping to generate meaningful revenue from ads displayed on mobile devices – to have to work very hard in order to create a strategy that will encourage users to actually click and take action on the links that are posted. The most recent effort that Facebook has made in this vein has been in opening up the social network’s user data up to brands that would be using the platform for placing ads.

ZipDial has now become the social network’s first acquisition from that country, in a sizeable purchase.

Twitter has now made its first acquisition of an Indian company, in the form of a mobile marketing firm called ZipDial, which was purchased for what was reported to be in the area of $30 to $40 million.

This considerably boosts the investment that Twitter has made in India, which has massive growth potential.

ZipDial is a mobile marketing and analytics startup that is based in Bangalore. A the time that this article was written, no terms for this acquisition had been released. However, TechCrunch, the technology website, had been displaying a report that had suggested that anonymous sources had quoted the aforementioned amount for the purchase. The acquisition greatly enhances the investment that Twitter has in India, which is one of the nations in which the social network is currently experiencing sizeable growth.

The mobile marketing acquisition also establishes a new engineering office for Twitter, in Bangalore.

ZipDial was originally founded in 2010. It provides its customers with phone numbers that can be incorporated into marketing campaigns. It works when consumers phone these numbers, but hang up (as a missed call) before they are actually connected, thereby avoiding any charges or minutes usage. In return, they receive a mobile ads via text message, which contain promotions from which they can benefit.

This type of mobile advertising communication functions especially well in areas where cell phone connections aren’t all that reliable, or where they don’t necessarily have access to data connections.

According to the Twitter VP of product, Christian Oestlien, it won’t be long before there will be billions of additional internet users who have come online for their very first time, in countries such as India, Indonesia, and Brazil. He added that “For many, their first online experience will be on a mobile device – but the cost of data may prevent them from experiencing the true power of the Internet. Twitter, in partnership with ZipDial, can make great content more accessible to everyone.”

ZipDial’s mobile marketing platform has engaged almost 60 million users, to date, and boasts hundreds of marketer and brand clients.