Facebook’s 2012 teaches us that mobile strategy is mandatory

For those brave souls willing to dig through analyst calls and investor statements, a bounty of interesting tidbits awaits in Facebook’s 2012 financial results. The social networking behemoth clocked in at 5.089 billion in revenue, up substantially from the3.711 billion from 2011. More interesting for us marketers are these few tidbits.

• Monthly active users (MAUs) were 1.06 billion as of December 31, 2012, an increase of 25% year-over-year
• Daily active users (DAUs) were 618 million on average for December 2012, an increase of 28% year-over-year
• Mobile MAUs were 680 million as of December 31, 2012, an increase of 57% year-over-year

If that doesn’t jump out loudly enough, Mark Zuckerberg had this to say:

“2012 was a big year for us. We made the big transition where now there are more people using Facebook on mobile everyday than on desktop.”

And finally, deep in the slide deck for the call comes this gem: in Q4 of 2012, 157 million of Facebook’s Monthly Active Users – about 15% – are mobile only.

15% of Facebook users are accessing the site from only a mobile device. That’s an absolutely stunning number. Here’s the big takeaway: if Facebook drives any amount of traffic to your web properties, and if that traffic is representative of the Facebook audience as a whole, then up to 15% of your inbound traffic from Facebook is on a mobile device exclusively, and more than half is coming from Facebook at least some of the time on a mobile device.

Your site, your properties, your content, your media must be mobile-ready if you interact with the Facebook audience at all. I did a quick look in my own analytics this morning.

All mobile site traffic on my personal website clocked in at 17.35% for Q4 2012. But Facebook-sourced traffic?

23.8%, which is a 37% increase. If I were to do a massive campaign or spend on Facebook, I’d need to know that making it mobile-friendly for that crowd was an imperative. Close to 1 in 4 visitors would be coming from Facebook on a mobile device.

Bottom line: If you’re marketing on Facebook, you’re marketing to a mobile-heavy crowd. Alter your strategy accordingly.

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