Last month, a couple of research studies of smartphone users were released, one from Arbitron/Edison Research and another from Google. The questions in each study reflect the interests of the research sponsors: Arbitron looked rather closely at Internet radio usage, for example, while Google paid a lot of attention to mobile marketing. The common finding, however, is not at all surprising—smartphones are becoming ever more closely integrated into the daily life of many Americans.
- Smartphone usage doubled in past year (NetNewsCheck) “The percentage of Americans age 12 and older who have a smartphone has risen from 14% to 31% of the population according to the new survey ‘The Infinite Dial 2011: Navigating Digital Platforms.’ ‘When you consider the rapid growth in ownership of smartphones in context with the continued rise in the use of social media it becomes increasingly clear that these platforms are fueling fundamental changes in consumer expectations and how they use media,’ Arbitron senior vice president of marketing Bill Rose said.”
- Google research shows how people use smartphones to help them buy stuff (ReadWriteWeb/John Paul Titlow) “Interestingly, more people (81%) said they browse the Web on their device than said they use native applications (68%). For ecommerce sites and other businesses, these numbers suggest that investing in one’s mobile-optimized Website could be more important than building native apps.”
- Smartphone user study shows mobile movement under way (Google Mobile Ads blog) “Make sure you can be found via mobile search as consumers regularly use their phones to find and act on information. Incorporate location based products and services and make it easy for mobile customers to reach you because local information seeking is common among smartphone users.”
- How dumb are smartphone users? (Broadstuff/Alan Patrick) “While reading the whole thing I also became aware that many of these were probably generic facts, ie applied to nearly any comms device—so I replaced the term ‘smartphone’ with ‘dumbphone’ and found the results still made nearly total sense, ie these are generic ‘this is what people do on phones’ stats (They still made quite a lot of sense when I replaced smartphone with ‘carrot’…..).”
Website fact:
Google has launched a beta website, called Think Insights, to share “…on-going learnings and insights about digital marketing trends.”
