Mobile Time is Spent on Marginal Distractions (like Email and Social)

justin mobile, social

If you see someone on their smartphone, chances are they are either checking email or checking Facebook.

You. With the smartphone. You on Facebook? Yeah.
You. With the smartphone. On Facebook? Likin’ it like it’s your job.

That’s according to a couple different sources of data.  A report from LiveIntent which found that a whopping 14 minutes out of every hour spent with mobile was spent in email (23%).  Separately, comScore found that 24% of all mobile time was spent with Facebook.

Note that comScore’s definition of “mobile” here includes tablets and smartphones whereas LiveIntent’s data … not sure.

Further note that LiveIntent found that time spent on social on mobile was only about nine minutes for every hour, which obviously conflicts with comScore’s findings.

Regardless of the actual figure, I think of mobile time as marginal time.  When we have a moment to ourselves, our minds seek information, activity, or distraction.  What easier way to scratch that mental itch than with our mobile device?

But a minute here and a minute there also demands we constrain our activities to things we can do quickly.  Catching up on an email or two (so long as you aren’t drafting a response) is something that can be done with marginal time. Checking your Facebook feed is an easy distraction.

It’s filler behavior.  It’s passive distraction.

So these stats don’t surprise me.

 

Great(er) Expectations—The Effects of Digital on Patience

justin meta, social
Scene from Parks and Recreation, tossing a computer.
What is your reaction when websites take forever to load?

An article by Nicholas Carr titled The Patience Deficit discusses the human perception of time.  Specifically, the article alludes to research around page load times and video load times—in short, as we get faster Internet connections, we grow less tolerant of slower web page and video loads.  Here’s the relevant clip from the study:

Back in 2006, a famous study of online retailing found that a large percentage of online shoppers would abandon a retailing site if its pages took four seconds or longer to load. In the years since then, the so-called Four Second Rule has been repealed and replaced by the Quarter of a Second Rule. Studies by companies like Google and Microsoft now find it takes a delay of just 250 milliseconds in page-loading for people to start abandoning a site. “Two hundred fifty milliseconds, either slower or faster, is close to the magic number now for competitive advantage on the Web,” a top Microsoft engineer said in 2012. To put that into perspective, it takes about the same amount of time for you to blink an eye.

Carr goes on to reference separate 2012 research around online video viewing that suggests a causal link between faster Internet connections and less patience for “startup delay.”  Here’s a clipped graph from the research (PDF):

startupdelaygraph

The takeaway from the above seems to be that when it comes to our expectations around digital media load times, they are connection-dependent. Raise your hand if you’ve gotten stupidly upset when your home internet goes down?  And while our tolerance for (slower) mobile Internet connection speeds may be greater, we are still only willing to tolerate so much.

I wonder about how this human behavioral component affects other interactions.  Here’s one that should hit home: who hasn’t groaned when a friend or family member has left you a voicemail in lieu of sending you a text message?

whycheckvoicemail
Not scientific but this about sums up my personal feelings toward checking voicemail.

While text-based communications have all sorts of shortcomings, their advantage is the easy of transmittal.  A glance and you can read a text message.  It also takes more effort to draft a text due to the interface (typing); this makes the sender more likely to stay on point.

The effect of digital on our expectations is profound yet poorly understood.

Your thoughts?

H/T to NTO.

* Clipped from a book titled What Should We Be Worried About? 

Facebook Ads Boost Paid Search Performance

justin search, social
iGtVCj7
Why can’t we be friends?

When people think about Facebook and Google whether it be in the context of their consumer products or their advertising, the two are often cast as competitive enemies.  Of course, the truth is a lot murkier.

To wit, when it comes to an omnichannel on-my-channel marketing strategy, playing with both Google and Facebook might seem like a no-brainer.  To that end, Kenshoo was commissioned by Facebook to find what the impact of Facebook ads was on paid search conversions.  And true to form, Kenshoo found that total conversions were up 19% on average with an 11% increase in conversion rate and a decrease in cost per acquisition of 10%.

Check it out:

kenshoo_fb_ads_sweetspot

So when it comes to advertising on Facebook and Google … why can’t we be friends?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRGd0gD0QNE