{6:25 minutes to read} In the general context of business, we have to recognize the continuing movement toward more mobilization—starting from PalmPilots and laptops to now regularly conducting business on a smartphone.
I’ve done other posts in the past discussing the need for your website to be mobile optimized—not just mobile friendly, but mobile optimized. We also need to start paying attention to some technologies, like hashtags on LinkedIn, which are coming into play. It’s too early for us to comment much because they haven’t finished it yet. They haven’t really made it clear what they’re doing, other than that hashtags have appeared on LinkedIn’s mobile app and desktop versions, but they aren’t clickable yet on desktops.
We’re experimenting and looking into it now, but this overall trend brings to light the need to accommodate a mobile workforce and being able to do business on mobile devices.
As someone who’s been in technology for multiple decades, I’ve never been terribly comfortable doing my day-to-day business on small-screen devices. I haven’t considered myself all that mobile, though for many years I’ve always had a laptop and a smartphone. I certainly do conduct business on those devices, but my primary day-to-day functions of email, screen sharing, collaborative work, Google Drive, etc. are done on a desktop.
My desktop died on Monday, and I’m in a quandary as to whether to replace it. The fact of the matter is my laptop can do basically anything that my desktop can do; it just has a smaller screen. My phone can come pretty close, in most cases, to doing what I need to do, and I know my partner, Vik, operates almost exclusively on a larger-screen smartphone.
There are advantages and disadvantages of being mobile. Being able to connect business from anywhere, and reply to emails and messages and work from anywhere, is fantastic. In fact, our workforce at phoneBlogger.net is almost completely mobile as far as work from home, work from laptop computers, etc. I’m one of the mainstays that has been operating off a desktop for so many years, I’m just used to the large monitor. I’m currently running my laptop with a big monitor plugged into it. There are a few downsides, but I’m feeling it out before deciding whether to replace my desktop or not.
As we’ve done some development work in helping some of our clients with custom-tailored websites and whatnot, we’ve been paying tremendous attention over the last couple of years to mobility.
We have a number of clients that we monitor their website analytics. They’ve been with us for years, and we’ve helped them with their websites.
Yesterday, we were looking into what devices are being used for one professional services client who happens to be in Manhattan. How are visitors accessing their website? For the first time ever, I saw that they actually have more mobile visitors than they had desktop visitors; a near 55-45% ratio. That was pretty striking to me.
Over the past 2 years, we’ve been seeing those numbers step up from 5% to 30% in some cases. And when I say mobile, I’m talking about everything from tablets down through smartphones.
What was even more striking to me, and this may be specific to Manhattan, was that of this particular client’s 55% of total traffic coming via mobile, more than half of that was specifically from iPhones.
I myself am not an iPhone user, nor do I really care for the whole Mac world of technology. It’s not what I was raised on and not something I’ve paid a whole lot of attention to other than, of course, to make sure our work functions well in the Mac sphere.
For our professional services clients, pretty much every prospective client of theirs—whether coming to them from the internet or from a referral—is going to go to their company website sooner or later. When more than half of them are visiting the website via a mobile device, what content is there and how that content is presented is obviously crucial.
I think a lot of our client base is, to use an old phrase, middle-aged, and are established, practicing professionals. Mobile optimization may not be something for which that age group, myself included, feels natural or comfortable. We may text and do some quick emails and stuff like that on smartphones, but we may not be realizing that we’re not crossing the threshold between traditional and desktop-sized devices.
If you haven’t taken mobile optimization seriously, you need to start. It’s not only NOT going away; it’s accelerating. It’s really fascinating, actually, and a little scary, just how ubiquitously people are “on the internet” via a mobile device. They’re not using a traditional desktop Windows or Apple operating system and browsers near as much; they’re on mobile operating systems and browsers.
It’s been a continuous push, and I don’t see that backing off. So, we need to be paying attention, and we have been, and you should, too.
Contact us today with any questions or comments.
Mark Bullock
Telephone: (631) 754-0800
Email: Mark@phoneBlogger.net
Website:phoneBlogger.net
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