Wake Up Marketers: Facebook Reveals Best Practices For Grabbing Mobile Users

According to Facebook, Australians are spending 43 per cent of the average day on their mobile devices and 50 per cent of all traffic going to publishers is coming from mobile. Sarah Personette, vice president of Facebook’s global business marketing, shared some insights into the mobile user’s mindset and hot tips to stop people’s thumbs on mobile- including B&T’s favourite ‘silent but deadly’.

Personette presented her findings to a packed warehouse of Aussie marketers and creatives during Facebook’s first Sydney Facebook IQ event. The event gave an in-depth view on a new mobile era in brand communications featuring industry experts including Toby Talbot, chief creative officer DDB, and Dr Bryon Sharp, director at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, as well as Facebook Australia and New Zealand’s managing director Stephen Scheeler and Facebook’s head of marketing science Steve Lockwood.

Mindset:

Personette told the crowd that disruptive ads, passive audiences and search are things of the past. “In today’s world, on a mobile device, ‘discovery’ actually reigns supreme. Every morning a billion people wake up, open up their phones, go on Facebook and have the opportunity to discover: discover information from their friends, from brands and businesses they are connected to, from news reporters, media publishers and entertainers. The mindset is discovery- ‘I don’t know but I’m willing to look, I don’t know what someone has done last night.’’s

Being able to tap into the discovery mindset, understand how to design and program for it within the creative is a massive shift in marketing. Advertisers and marketers have to think about new ways to connect with a consumer in a mobile world.

According to Personette: “Search is not a natural point of entry on a mobile device in the app economy. If you were taking the old search practices and applying them to the new world order you are missing out on the people you want to reach”.

For the non-believers, Personette gave the crowd a challenge- hand over your phone to the person sitting next and let them scroll through your Facebook app. “As you’re scrolling you are discovering something that was made for somebody else. When you open up your feed, whether it’s Instagram or Facebook, you are discovering something that was made for you-the interests, the likes, the friends and businesses they’re connected to.”

Sarah Personette

Stop The Thumbs:

The thumb is in charge when people are using mobile.

“We believe that by 2020 video will actually be the dominant format inside your feed. However we’ve also done a ton of research partnering with the creative community to understand what are the best practices or key creative considerations that we can take into mind when we are designing for feeds. What are the best practices when we are designing for the Facebook or Instagram environment or the mobile feed in general,” Personette said.

1. Capture attention quickly
2. Frame your visual story
3. Design for sound off

“What’s interesting about these is they are the flip of how you would tell stories on television. It requires us to build a different muscle.”

Building for sound off- silent but deadly- is the biggest takeaway. Brands need to help their customers get the message loud and clear without relying on sound. Personette told B&T after the presentation: “We find that 76 per cent of sound is actually off, so if that’s the case then designing for that creative best practice is important one. The first one is make sure you’re starting with a title card that’s drawing someone in, so that they know what they’re about to see. As you’re scrolling through your feed if you don’t know what journey you’re entering into you might just scroll past that particular video.

“The second piece is using captions, whether automated captions that we provide or captions that you build within the creative.  That helps to tell the story that you want people to understand without the use of sound. The last piece is that the usage of questions is actually a great device to hook and engage a particular person to wonder what if and what’s going to happen with a pay off at the end.

“It’s a flip of the way that TV advertising used to work, the way we used to design creative for television is you wanted to pay off with a crescendo and the end. Here we’re saying flip the crescendo and start with the destination of the story so they’re hooked and stay with the creative. So if you’re using music or voice-over as the particular device to hook the person, you might have lost them.”