This post is by Lori Randall Stradtman, who designs WordPress sites and blogs about social media trends at Social Media Design and Social Media Examiner.
Mobile devices represent a radical, but necessary shift in how information is processed. At last month’s BlogWorld Expo, Jason Baptiste and Shane Ketterman had a lively session that showed us why it’s so vital to optimize websites and blog posts specifically with a mobile audience in mind.
Ketterman said he periodically checked his analytics to see how his readers were accessing his content. After several months, he noticed a steadily increasing number of readers who were accessing his blog via mobile devices. He also took note of where they were coming from and became more intentional about speaking to them directly instead of talking to them as a faceless, broad audience.
Worldwide mobile use statistics have been on the rise for the past few years. When Ketterman discovered that his statistics were consistent with global trends, he decided to make the leap and optimize his content for mobile readers, so that everybody gets a good read.
If you’re reading this right now from a mobile device you know that it’s a very different experience from reading via a desktop monitor, if you even use those anymore. Information has to be concise and interesting enough to hold your interest. How does one cater to mobile readers?
Storylines are essential. Your content has to have a hook to draw readers in and tell them a story in a way that’s good enough to convince them to come back for more. Bite-sized pieces of content are essential, but each morsel has to be well-crafted or else it’s just skimpy and uninteresting. Your content has to be compelling enough to get readers to want to time shift the post.
Time shifting occurs when people discover a post, find it interesting, but do not have the time or space to read it through just then. If it’s interesting enough, they will save it for later by e-mailing it to themselves or via services such as Instapaper. These services make it easy to defer reading something until later, but the content has to be really compelling for someone to actually take the time to read through your post.
Four ways to enhance your reader’s mobile experience:
Make it personal. Create an experience for your readers that reflects who you are.
We’re all publishers now. Remember that you can use mobile devices to break news — consider the guy who tweeted about Osama’s demise.
Remember that we live in the now. Publish your content as soon as you can. Don’t fret about styling it just right.
Make your ads enjoyable. If you’re going to use ads make sure they’re entertaining.
And as a final note, Baptiste gave us a bit of advice that was so well received that we might have to print up T-shirts with this message:
“Friends don’t let friends use Flash!” Per Baptiste, “Everyone agrees that HTML5 is the way to go.”
How are you catering to mobile readers?
Image credit: bezov, via iStock Photo
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This is good advice, especially the part about Flash. Content has to be relevant to the audience, and with a mobile reader, it also has to catch them at the right time, when they have a chance to read. So make sure there is a way to subscribe for an email newsletter or something similar, so your newly found audience doesn't just visit once. Extending a hand so they can leap over to your site back at a regular PC is essential. Mobile is 'hear and now', but it can also be tomorrow and the day after!
There are a bunch more ideas and rules for mobile sites and content in a free series of ebooks that readers may be interested in: http://www.consected.com/mobile-sites-free-ebook
Nice post!
Phil
My recent post Why do I need a mobile website?
I find that content that is "optimized" for mobile devices often is not too optimal. I'll go to, say, CNBC.com on my Droid, but have trouble finding the information I like from the website, which is the jobs/economic news. They've simplified and streamlined for mobile, but left me with a different experience, different site, and frustration trying to find what I like about the "normal site." I find this a lot. So, optimize with caution.
Take home messages from this post:
1. More people are using smartphones these days
2. Smartphones provide a different viewing experience (presumably due to the small screen size)
3. Blug posts need to be interesting to catch people's attention
4. Sometimes people save articles and read them at a later time
5. Four unrelted tips for bloggers
6. Don't use Flash!!!
Thanks for the Perl's of wisdom….
"Optimize" your LAYOUT for mobile viewers, not your CONTENT. Your content should be the same regardless. I'm sick of being force-fed crappy "mobile optimized" sites that prevent me from finding what I was looking for. It's better to serve a user the page they requested on your non-mobilized site than to automatically route them to the home page of your crappy mobile site.
To illustrate, I read my email on my phone. Often, someone will send me a link to a specific page within a site. I tap the link, only to be redirected to the home page of the mobile "friendly" version of that site, and I'm then forced to forge around looking for the page I originally requested. This is a _horrible_ practice.
Don't be stupid. Don't have a mobile site just because it makes you look cutting-edge and trendy. Make your content available to all users regardless of how they're accessing it.
I see what you mean about content that's so stripped of actual… content that it's lame. Good point. It irritates me too. I guess the balance is figuring out to be more pithy with our content. There, I used a 10 cent word and everything! LOL
Thanks for your comment!
My recent post Pure Joy in Your Chaos
It's a programming language. LOL I live amongst Nerds.
My recent post Pure Joy in Your Chaos
Great post! I write a legal blog for CEB and thought you all might be interested in a post I wrote about writing differently when your readers will likely be reading it online through a mobile device.
http://blog.ceb.com/2011/01/26/writing-for-the-on…
Interesting! What is the best way to check if we have "mobile" visitors? I've created a simple blog for my small business and I admit I didn't think at all about mobile readers. Will have to check this out.
Thanks
Anita
My recent post Small kitchen designs