What Facebook’s Great Unbundling Means for Mobile Content Promotion

Facebook hasn’t been making many friends among brands lately. The social network’s latest move to reduce the organic reach of its Pages means that even large companies have watched their traffic slow to a crawl. Facebook is still a great place for brands—that is, if they’re willing to pay for content promotion. 

Mobile Internet usage is poised to overtake desktop usage, and that means that a brand’s content promotion strategy has to do more than include mobile—it has to make mobile a central element. With Facebook’s massive mobile user base, how should brands handle this latest move?

Big Blue breakdown

What GigaOm writer Matthew Ingram calls the Great Unbundling of Facebook is a shift of focus from desktop to mobile. It follows a trend that reveals 1 billion active users on mobile, and their desire for apps that allow them to perform a single task at a time: taking photos, messaging friends, searching for ecommerce sites, reading news. By breaking a large, noisy platform into digestible bites, mobile users can have a clean and uncluttered user experience with Facebook without a large, noisy platform to distract them.

What single apps mean for mobile content promotion

With more than half of all Internet traffic coming from mobile—and with Facebook planning to announce a mobile ad network at the end of this month—the move to unbundle forces brands to think about how to reach their target audiences with content. How can a brand leverage mobile audiences and deliver the best content?

Learning to navigate Facebook’s new unbundled apps might offer a path toward reaching audiences effectively and consistently. Concentrating on content that’s shareable, simple and supportive is the best way to take advantage of mobile apps; but finding ways to work paid promotion into strategy will be more important as mobile audience share grows.

Think mobile when creating content promotions

Mobile audiences and traditional digital audiences are often the same, as users consume the same content across devices. Keep that in mind when crafting a paid promotional plan. But it’s also important to remember that apps give mobile users flexibility in where and how they consume content.

Apps like Instagram and WhatsApp rely on images and instant messages. Twitter’s platform focuses on short messages that allow users to share links, images and other information. The common threads for apps like these include the ability to share. So brands need to create content promotion that’s image-heavy; photos and graphics that are clickable can lead to more complex content for users to view later.

When using text, the simpler the better. That doesn’t mean there’s no place in mobile for advanced content; it just means that the calls-to-action used to entice clickthrough should be clear and concise.

Finally, data is just as important for mobile content promotion as it is for other digital marketing. Research the sites your target audience visits via mobile, the apps they use and how they use them, and how they share content via mobile.

As Facebook goes, so goes the rest of social media, and Facebook’s revenue future is in mobile. Marketers who are ready to focus on mobile will be preparing for the future.

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