Social sharing on mobile is often a big ol’ #fail

From our Relevanza site:

Social sharing on mobile is often a big ol’ #fail.

And you know what we mean: it is usually far more difficult to share content from one’s smartphone than from the web on one’s desktop or laptop. And with most of us accessing the web these days with our smartphones the social sharing problem is a real problem for marketeers.

In a study conducted almost a year ago, now, but still relevant Moovweb discovered social sharing buttons were clicked in only 0.2 percent of the 61 million smartphone sessions they studied.

These figures get even more curious and concerning when we consider we spend the overwhelming amount of our time on the social networks on our mobile devices. If we’re on any of the major social networks we’ve reached them from our smartphones more often than not. (In the U.S., alone, 127.6 million Facebook users reach the network on mobile devices.)

The Moovweb study also found mobile users are 11.5 times more likely to click on an ad than use the social sharing buttons.

And it gets worse:

“For a subset of sites we analyzed, we found that people were 35% less likely to tap on a sharing button when they accessed a site via mobile versus via desktop,” Moovweb suggested.

Clearly, a disconnect exists and that makes for plenty of missed opportunities. But why the disconnect?

Moovweb suggests a large part of the disconnect is what it calls a “log-in” problem.

“Most mobile users access social networks via an app, so they are often not logged in to the corresponding (or other) social networks on the mobile web,” Moovweb points out. “Pinterest, for example, gets 75% of its traffic from apps.The heart of the sharing problem is that users must be logged in in order to share. If you’re not logged in, sharing can be kind of a nightmare.”

Say, for example using the social networks mentioned by Moovweb, you’re on your smartphone looking at Pinterest (which is overwhelmingly the case with Pinterest) and you see a pin you’d like to share to Facebook. You discover you must first sign into Facebook on the mobile web to share than pin and that is usually a PITA, relatively speaking on the mobile experience. Yea, we’ve become so jaded and spoiled that signing in has become a roadblock.

Another significant part of the problem — not mentioned by Moovweb — is that way too many apps and mobile websites (or mobile versions of websites) have yet to catch up with the mobile ecosystem.

Far too often it is simply too difficult (and sometimes even impossible) to share content found in an app or a mobile website to your favorite social network. Heck, we’ve even seen (more than a few) newspaper apps (just as an example of a content-rich app) where users aren’t even given the option of sharing that content.

Part of that problem is found, again, in the log-in problem but another part is the simple fact mobile sites and apps are not built well enough to make social sharing the simple process it should be.

And that’s our failing as digital marketeers. We must learn to design apps and mobile websites with social sharing as a primary function or we’ll find ourselves in a perpetual state of self-limitation.

Another part of the problem is speed. While apps tend to (but not always) load faster than mobile websites, we mobile users get bored and impatient very quickly — like in less than a a couple of seconds — and we either move on or stay long enough to see whatever we’re loading but don’t want to bother attempting to share it on the social networks. Gotta go, gotta move!

Google recognized the speed problem a while ago and is working on its Accelerated Mobile Pages project.

But that won’t let marketeers off the hook for thinking through the mobile sharing problem and developing, designing ways to improve it and fully transition clients from a web-based series of digital marketing solutions to mobile series of digital marketing solutions.

Yea, we’re working on that here at Relevanza.

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