Until recently, Facebook faced a wall of criticism that that it had didn’t sufficiently capitalise on its mobile users. The location changed in January of this year, when Facebook announced its 2012 Q4 earnings, revealing that mobile accounted for around 23 per cent (or $305m of its $1.33bn of advertising revenues within the quarter. As well as this, Instagram was used to share greater than 600m photos to Facebook on New Year’s Day alone.

To underscore the rising importance of social media on mobile, comScore revealed recently that Facebook accounts for 23 per cent of all time spent on mobile apps inside the US, that’s an enormous period of time. This may only increase with the launch of Facebook Home, that’s neither an app nor an operating system, but an ’apperating system’ because the editor of Wired recently (and cleverly!) called it. Facebook Home will tie Facebook even further into the very fabric of the mobile user experience, and supply modern-day insights and opportunities for advertisers.

Positive results

The inextricable rise of social media advertising is something that anybody who buys mobile media may have witnessed, with the upward push of customized ad units appearing within social platforms, namely Facebook and Twitter. On Facebook alone, we’ve seen extremely positive results, although largely with direct response app acquisition campaigns.

This success is basically end result of the quality of information that Facebook provides, which leads to more precise targeting, more relevance, and ultimately a lot more effective engagement and download numbers. It’s also because of the creative units rolled out during the last few months that permit users to put in the app without leaving Facebook.
More data and insight can only be a great thing for consumers inside the long run, as it means they are going to be served a lot more relevant advertising, so it’s a situation where both the logo and the client win. 

As a counterpoint, plenty of Facebook advertisers have seen short-term spikes, but have did not generate sustained long-term scale and efficiency. Through quite a few labor, here is something that we’ve got managed to beat for our clients; the following crucial step for Facebook is to enable its inventory for real-time bidding, as a way to enable advertisers to actually leverage the optimization tools which are emerging within the mobile space, namely DSPs (Demand Side Platforms). Meanwhile the Facebook ‘Power Editor’ tool remains the best approach to get scale and results, although this isn’t easy, and requires constant optimization and monitoring from a dedicated social team.

Twitter Cards

Facebook isn’t the only social platform obviously. Twitter remains an impressive force, and the hot announcement of mobile app deep-linking functionality within Twitter Cards is a major opportunity for mobile advertisers. This new functionality signifies that users will, as Twitter explains it: “be ready to click a link to either view content directly for your app, or download your app, reckoning on whether they have your app installed”.

We wholly expect this new functionality from Twitter to play a big part in app acquisition campaigns, and we don’t have any doubt that Twitter may be developing other similar solutions for advertisers usually. Moreover, other social players, corresponding to Foursquare and other local check-in platforms, have become great shared results with high street retailers, and this may increasingly keep growing.

Second screen advertising also represents another piece of the ever-growing social mobile ecosystem. Whilst it isn’t a pure social play as such, second screen advertising creates a connection between broadcast TV and digital interaction that could only be leveraged by social platforms. The will for us to share and have interaction more with what we’re watching is rapidly at the rise and may be seen with apps similar to Zeebox, The Walking Dead Companion App and Peel. Increasing #hashtag usage from these second screen platforms is, to me, the fastest growing mobile/social opportunity for advertisers after Facebook.

Overall, we’re still on the very early stages of social mobile advertising, however the opportunity is immense. It’s still to be made clear how Facebook will best utilize Home to serve contextually relevant advertising to customers, and we’re still to finesse brand awareness campaigns, as up to now it has largely been about delivering direct response and app downloads. Overall, however, these are new and exciting times for mobile social advertising, and these new opportunities are ones that we fully expect many brands to bring to the fore in their ongoing mobile strategy.

Eric Mugnier is senior vice chairman at M&C Saatchi Mobile