One site I follow and highlight here on the blog often is eMarketer. There insight into the Web is great. They provide great prospective on what may happen in the future. They analyze trends and also give opinion on how things will look in the future. I also think their information is useful for determining the trends in related industires.
A recent post on eMarketer discussed video, social media and smartphone usage.
From One-third of US population will use social networking and video on mobile devices by 2016:
Mobile social networking will reach a greater share of the overall population even sooner, however. One-third of US consumers, or 42.6% of mobile phone users, will log in to social networking sites via mobile devices at least monthly by 2014. The vast majority of these mobile social network users—like mobile video viewers and mobile music listeners—will be using a smartphone to access social content on the go.
It’s pretty obvious that mobile usage is increasing. Smartphones and tablets will have a big impact on the way website design their content.
While the impact on video, music and social networks like Facebook will be important, I think the mobile trend will also impact blogging.
How to Plan for Mobile Blog Visitors
As more people use their phones and tablets to visit sites, it’s important to understand the implications.
Design
The design of your site will be affected by the increase in mobile usage. Some sites are using an entirely separate mobile site for smartphone viewers. What I prefer is to maintain a single site, but design it so that it’s optimized for mobile, tablet, and desktop. I feel it will save you resources when it comes to maintaining only one site. You can look into something like response design. This allows the screen to change sizes depending on the device a person is viewing your web page on. You can also find a screen size and layout that works on all three modes of site visitation.
Speed
Mobile connections are getting better, but you still need a fast loading site. If your site doesn’t load people will easily click on the close button and move on to the next site. Lose the clutter on your pages. Remove all the things that aren’t critical. Leave the important items and make sure your page loads fast. You want people to get to your content quickly even if they have a bad Internet connection. Even Google is promoting page load speed. They’ll reward your site in the rankings if you are a fast site.
Search & Social
That leads us into search and social. Google has been combining the two for a few years. It’s important to realize that people use search and click on links in social media all the time while using their phones. A blogging strategy is a great way to take advantage of both search and social. Your posts will show up in the rankings for searches and you’ll have people sharing your posts on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.