Recently, Facebook began publishing statistics about its user base. I want to highlight some of their statistics about mobile and talk a bit about what these facts point to about the future of online research communities.
The first is this: There are more than 100 million users currently accessing Facebook through their smartphones on a monthly basis. This represents approximately 20% of all Facebook members.
Now, think about this statistic for a moment: To me, this implies that people are already comfortable with the concept of participating in an online community via a smartphone. With numbers of this magnitude, we're not talking about a"fringe element" or something that only early adopters do. Nope. When over 100 million people are doing something, its clearly something that has mass appeal.
Perhaps even more compelling for a researcher is this: People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice as active as non-mobile users.
Simply put, smartphone users are far more engaged than their non-mobile peers.
This makes a lot of sense, since it's much easier to steal a snapshot or update your status "as it happens" when all you need to do is pull your phone out of your pocket.
But, the story gets better. Projections show that within 12 months more people will be buying smartphones than feature phones. This tells me we are quickly reaching a powerful tipping point that will have ramifications for the research industry for years to come.
Despite not having a fully-functioning crystal ball, I'm lucky enough to be paid to foresee major trends in consumer behavior, and figuring out what it means for marketing research. In doing that a couple of years ago, our mobile research strategy was born. Embracing the two megatrends above led to the launch of iCommunities mobile for iPhone and iPod touch.
I hope you can take a couple of minutes to check out this video that shows how we are talking to consumers about iCommunities mobile and how it enables research to better fit into their lifestyle.
Right now, we're conducting pilot tests with a few of our clients to understand how best to take advantage of this new research technology. Like any first-to-market product, we expect to learn a lot in the coming months. Yet, we anticipate the transition of consumers into mobile research communities to be relatively smooth -- thanks to ubiquitous world of Facebook.
