Social media mobile usage is on the boost these days. Is your site ready? 
The use of mobile platforms for social media access is huge. More than 500 million people in 2014 used their phones to access Facebook exclusively (source). Twitter users spend 86% of their time on the network through their smartphones (source). Four out of 10 all-time most popular mobile apps are social media (Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram and Twitter).
Most people using a smart phone right now do it to access their social media feeds…
The key takeaway here: LOTS of mobile phone users are on social media daily. They would love to see and click your links there, they would love to share your articles with their friends.
But most people cannot do that:
Your site won't let them.
The Need to Enhance For Mobile Surfing
Investing time and effort into ensuring that everything you publish is enhanced for mobile surfing is going to be your most direct approach to solving this massive issue. The smoother you make the process of social sharing for the user, the more likely your site visitors are to be enticed by those CTAs you are putting at the end of posts, or to retweet/share those posts you are publishing on your profiles.
Recommended: How to Find Your Best Tweets and Buffer Them
It is about improving the mobile experience, making the user feel a sense of loyalty to you. Loyalty means more authority for your brand and your content, and authority makes you the go-to resource for whatever you are offering. Mobile-only users will have no choice but to spread you through their social apps.
When looking at workarounds, they can come off as pretty generic. But until more integrated technology is available that take into account the unique challenges of mobile social marketing, these are still more the most stable means of improving the numbers.
Test Your Own Sharing Button on Mobile
The first thing to do is to actually try sharing your site URLs to social media: An obvious step an incredible number of website owners miss.
Here are some of the inconveniences you may find:
(Mind that those inconveniences prevent your URL from being shared on social media: This is a forever lost one-time opportunity to be seen!)
1. Your social media message is anti-social: Your reader won't probably share:
2. Your share button brings you to a Safari page instead of opening an app
Remember the stats in the opening of the article? Most people access their social media accounts using apps: They won't even remember their passwords to login and share from the web browser!
3. It is simply impossible to share:
4. The buttons are too small to be clicked:
(Better keep fewer buttons: Not many people have tiny fingers!)
How you fix those issues depends on your resources: You can experiment with different social media share button platforms or you can tweak your own CCS if you have a good designer on staff.
The main thing is, these issues are not to be ignored: It's how your content spreads on the fastest growing medium!
Make Your Site Mobile App Friendly
Once they click through to your site, you have to make sure the mobile version of your site looks good. This should be obvious, right? Yet, how often do you click on a link you are interested in, have it open in the app itself, and then get bogged down with slow loads, bad layouts, and endless comments?
A shocking number of even huge sites have not optimized for mobile surfing, and they have lost a lot because of it. Not only will people never share that content, they probably won't even read it. And in the future, when they come across more links from that site, they are going to completely ignore it.
Here are some tools to help:
- Measure your page load time and clearly see which elements slow it down. This tool is the easiest free way to do that.
- Get rid of spam comments: Not only do they hurt your site image, they also slow down your pages!
- Select a good hosting provider to ensure fast load time. Sitegeek is my go-to site when it comes to comparing hosting companies and accessing reader reviews.
- Test your site mobile friendliness using Google's tool: It's one the most reliable free ways to do that.
- Monitor your site performance using a separate dashboard in Cyfe: In my case, I have Zendesk and Pingdom enabled there and that's the first tab I open in the morning.
Simplification As A Virtue
Twitter has kind of forced us to look at status updates in a different way. With such a limited amount of space, you really have to make every character count. Simplification is necessary. Those lessons should be carried on to any other networks you are using.
Mobile screens are small, and they are made for quick skimming and knee jerk reactions. People don't want complex, long, difficult to see statuses on any social network.
It's a good idea to use mobile-friendly “Tweet a quote” calls-to-action to generate more tweets from mobile users.
Create A Mobile App With Social Functionality
Mobile apps are a great way to improve your reach by having an isolated program that caters entirely to your customer base. Even popular blogs have gotten in on this action, and they are used more that mobile versions of the site that might not have the same intuitive design.
If you create an app, you can make it socially functional by encouraging sharing at any opportunity. For example, if you are an app storefront, let people share what they have bought, or socially share wishlists. Make it easy to review using social logins, so it will post that review on their page (if they allow).
Goodreads is a fantastic app that uses this kind of idea. Both their mobile app and desktop connects socially and posts their book reviews, what they are reading, and what they want to read.
If you are limited in development resources, use BuildFire to easily create a dedicated app for your website. It's very affordable too! Mine took me probably a few hours to put together:
Have a tactic that has worked for you in the past to improve your social marketing on mobile platforms? Let us know in the comments!