Mobile marketing has seen some important advancements within the last year especially within the United States. Recent advancements in phone technology like the iPhone has provided new growth rates and invigorated a market base for mobile search. The usual types of mobile search that is indicative of popular usage today is rapidly changing into a more well rounded search medium.
Downloading games, Ringtones, local search and text messaging are still very popular and with the recent movement by the MMA to create a unified mobile search standard and better phones with better mobile search technology we are starting to see more usage for other things like video searches, social networking sites, e-mail usage and more emphasis on local search.
Many social networking sites have crossed into mobile search with Myspace mobile. Recently there has been a sprawl of mobile social sites springing up across the net as well such as Gotzapp, Mobango, Meetmoi, Bluepulse, Icebreaker, Mocospace and Loopt.
These are all sites that have spring up over the last year and are getting a lot of attention from venture capitalists. Some of the sites listed above have closed between 2-8 million within their second round of funding.
These sites seem fun and a lot of them have a unique twist to them however you will see the heavy players in the social networking realm start to push more users to mobile devices and will virtually take out the smaller sites listed here.
Video search is also gearing up to take on more users within the mobile search realm. A site called MyWaves recently came out and was built specifically mobile searches to search for video clips. YouTube also released YouTube Mobile and now with the iPhone making video search so easy, we can see an increase in video viewership for videos on mobile phones.
M:Metrics says that the current state of mobile video is still very low however it is on a respectable climb.
According to M:Metrics “12.3 million consumers in the US and Europe accessed a social networking site with their mobile handset during June 2007” which is a pretty impressive number for a trend that is still in its infancy.
This graph shows how many people sign onto a social networking site per day based on percentages of the total number of subscribers in a region. The majority of this traffic was directed to Myspace, Facebook and bebo and the age demographic of for this particular trend is reported to be 13 to 17 year-olds and 18 to 24 year-olds.
Emarketer said “The world’s biggest soft drink maker announced it was creating a mobile social network under the Sprite brand where members can set up profiles, post pictures and meet new friends”.
Mobile search marketing is one of the fastest growing trends in America and respectively has had some major set backs and consistent advancements in a short frame of time.
Joe Whyte is the President of HybridSEM.com, which offers quality Internet Marketing solutions at competitive rates, from social media marketing and reputation management to SEO and PPC.
