Recently, Read Write Web’s Richard McManus penned a series of articles around ‘The Visual Web’, “meaning that images and video are becoming an increasingly important part of what we consume online.”

I couldn’t agree more.  Speaking personally, Instagram started replacing Twitter as my social network of choice about a year ago.    More to the point, there is now a wealth of statistics to underpin what Richard is talking about.  This is specially when you consider that many of the biggest social media stories of the past year – Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest and now the likes of Socialcam – are visual.

Here are just a few of those stats:

• Most US and UK consumers now carry a device around with them allowing them to take and share engaging photos and video.   According to Comscore, most UK mobile phones are now smartphones.   The other day, Nielsen came out with research saying the same for the US.

• And more and more of those smartphone owners are using those features.  In 2010, 52% of photos in the US were taken with ‘single purpose cameras’, while 17% were taken with smartphones.   In 2011, that ratio changed to 44% / 27%.   Similarly, here in the UK, almost a third of consumers say their smartphone is the camera they use most often 

• As a result, we’re heading towards a point perhaps 1-2 years down the line where smartphones will account for the majority of pictures taken.   Indeed, the iPhone has been the most popular camera on Flickr for a while now 

• So there’s a huge growth in people taking pictures with their smartphones.  There is too in people sharing them.  At Christmas Instagram had 15 million users.   In March it was 25 million.   Now it’s 50 million, and growing at five million a week

• When it comes to mobile video, Socialcam has 36 million users, while Viddy has 26 million and signing up one million a day

• Tumblr, a blogging platform that lends itself more to images and less to 1000 word missives, is now the world’s largest blogging platform with 20 billion blog posts, 50 billion blogs and more than 120 million users.  Indeed, Tumblr will soon overtake the generic ‘blog’ as a term in Google searches

• Visual social networks are not only getting sign-ups, those signing up hang around.   Though I suspect the numbers have changed since then, at SXSW Instagram boss Kevin Systrom said 67% of users had logged in the previous day.

• Similarly, the latest emarketer figures show that worldwide, Tumblr and Pinterest users spent 89 minutes a month on their networks, compared to 21 minutes for Twitter users and 17 minutes for LinkedIn users.   Yes, Facebook dwarfs all of them with an average of 405 minutes a month / user, but I suspect some of that is due to people having Facebook on in the background during the day

• And speaking of Pinterest, it now sends more referral traffic to sites than Twitter despite being only 7% as big.     There is a debate about whether those referrals translate into sales, but I agree with the argument that it all depends what your Pinterest boards refer them too (i.e. whether they buy or not is really up to you).

So what should you do as a brand? Shift your social media strategy from being word to being image led – or at least change the mix between the two.   Related to that, develop a visual social media strategy.   Register your profiles on various visual social networks and figure out how you want to illustrate your brand.   Because if you don’t, millions of consumers will do so anyway.

Image – Sounds of the Sun

Related articles

• Why Socialcam Will Fail*(cloudave.com)

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• A Look Into 3 Social Video Apps: Socialcam, Viddy & Klip (readwriteweb.com)
• Why “Instagram For Video” Apps Will Go Big (readwriteweb.com)
• Pinterest drives more sales than Facebook: stats (econsultancy.com)
• Viddy Hits 26M Users, Is Valued at $200M [REPORT] (mashable.com)

Since Christmas the mobile photo network Instagram has gained over ten million users.  This makes Instagram the largest mobile only social network with a global reach (see comment and update below).  Foursquare by comparison is on around 22 million.

Instagram hasn’t officially announced these figures, and they aren’t published anywhere else as far as I can see.

Indeed, the network has been relatively quiet since the end of the year with a lot of noise surrounding it having been transferred to Pinterest.  My guess is that with Kevin Systrom in SXSW next week, an announcement has been timed for then.

So how do I know about Instagram’s continuing, phenomenal growth?

By looking at two Instagram web viewers, Statigram and Ink361, which use Instagram’s API.

If you go on each, you will see every Instagram user has a number.   Signing up during SXSW 2011 made me user 1,620,807 (the number is consistent, here I am on Ink361  and here I am on Statigram.

If you go backwards, there is no user 1 or user 2, but user 3 is none other than Kevin Systrom.   User 20  is Shayne Sweeney an Instagram engineer.

Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver was user 3,532,778 , posting his first image on April 28 2011.  Justin Bieber is no 6,860,189, and so on until you get to Instagram’s newest user as of 10am GMT – no 25,973,449 @holliejsmith.

Again, she has the same user number on both Statigram and Ink361, hence my belief that my total is accurate – the only caveat is that neither service displays private users, and so I can’t tell if missing accounts in the numerical sequence are private or dead.  Even if the latter is the case and there are one million deleted accounts, the total would still be around the 25 million mark.

Let’s put these figures into some kind of context.

Just before Christmas, Kevin Systrom told NPR in the US, that Instagram had 16 million users .  There obviously followed countless iPhones under Christmas trees plus acres of good publicity when Apple chose Instagram as its app of the year.  Then, Barack Obama’s campaign team started using the service

As a result, the best guess we’ve been telling Rabbit clients is 20 million users.  So actually, we’ve been out by around five million.

Instagram has achieved this while only running on iPod Touches, iPhones and iPads. An Android version is apparently in the works .

By comparison, the location based service Foursquare, which has been around for much longer and is cross-platform has three million fewer users – again you can tell this by going into the Foursquare site where every user again has a number.  As of 10am, the latest user to have signed up was ‘Nurelli M’, user no 22,499,416

Three visually led services have gained an awful lot of attention over the past year.

Pinterest is starting to break into mainstream consciousness with major media running articles about it. Tumblr is now the world’s biggest blogging platform, having passed WordPress.     And based on the above evidence, Instagram is definitely on the way to becoming a 1st tier social network, it’s prediction of hitting 50 million once it migrates to other platforms is entirely realistic.

Update – this story has now been picked up by The NextWeb and from there other sites.  From some of the latter, the question has come up:  How accurate is this figure as it is based on the API, and should it be treated with a grain of salt?

The comment I posted under TNW article I think answers this, in that the user ID numbers correspond to Instagram’s own pronouncements.   For example, accounts in the 16 million range 1st posted around Xmas, matching what Kevin Systrom told NPR about user numbers.

Thanks also to @bayjinger for the comment below, I accept (and it s all too easy to forget) that there are almost certainly Chinese mobile only social networks with more users (reach can of course be measured in a number of different ways).

Related articles

• iPhoneography – Instagram – Updated (theappwhisperer.com)
• Instagram 2.2 speeds up the camera and adds support for Japan’s Mixi and China’s Sina Weibo (thenextweb.com)
• Instagram Upgrades to Much Faster Camera, Heads to Asia (mashable.com)

Last week Comscore released a major report around the mobile Internet, Mobile Future in Focus.  A lot of that has already been covered by the major social media sites, so because I didn’t get my act together in putting my post up soon enough, I’ve summarised ten key findings from the report.

Essentially they show that across all markets, but in the UK in particular, mobile devices are now the norm and not the exception when it comes to consumers going online, something that should be front of mind for all marketers.

It shows that more affluent 25-44 year olds are typical smartphone owners and it shows that mobile devices are becoming an essential shopping companion when shoppers are in bricks and mortars stores.

1 – A majority of American (55.2%) and British (56.6%) mobile phone users now use mobile media, defined as browsing the web, downloading content or accessing apps.   Note however how far ahead Japan is, with three quarters accessing mobile online media.

2 – In fact, the UK (as well as Spain) has now passed the smartphone tipping point, with over half (51%) of mobile owners being smartphone users.    As long ago as May 2010, smartphone sales passed feature phone sales (as opposed to ownership) in the UK

3 – The UK is also ahead when it comes to web traffic from mobile devices (9.5%), compared to the US (8.2%), Australia (7.7%) and Japan (7.1%).  The latter figure suggests that though Japanese mobile phone users are more likely to go online in absolute terms (see stat one), UK mobile users access the web more heavily

Note that these figures account for all web traffic, including people sitting at work.   I’d guess you’d arrive at higher figures if you looked at people accessing the Internet outside of the workplace

4 – Certain media channels in particular are getting a lot of their traffic from mobile devices.  Comscore tells us that in December 17% of movie visitors reached the BBC through a combination of app and browser usage

5 – The top selling devices in both the US and the EU5 are the iPhone4 and the iPhone3GS (the iPhone4S is no three in the US and no 5 in the EU5)

Of course overall Android has a higher share of smartphones than Apple iPhones (31% vs 21% in Europe).   However, as I’ve posted previously if you are looking at handset sales you are looking at the wrong thing, you need to look at user behaviour, and previous research has shown that 61% of European mobile web traffic comes from Apple devices

6 – One reason for that could be that the ubiquity of Android phones means that if you walk into your local phones4u and ask for a “phone” you will be steered towards one of the many lower end Android devices.   Indeed, the cost of the monthly service was the second most important factor among European smartphone purchasers, behind network quality.

7 – In the EU5, most smartphone owners are still male (55.7% vs 44.3% – in the US it is a more even 51/49).   There has been evidence in the past to show that Android phones have more of a male bias than iPhones

8 – If you are running a mobile marketing campaign, don’t make the mistake of assuming your audience is all teens.  In both the US and EU5, smartphone ownership is heaviest among the 25-44 year old audience possibly due to the price of buying a handset and possibly due to the fact that a lot of workplaces  offer smartphones as their company phone

9 – A lot of attention in 2011 went on the mobile photo network Instagram (now arguably the largest mobile only social network in the world), and for a lot of US and European consumers the mobile is now their primary camera   In the States 74% and in the EU5 84% took photos with their phone.

The % who sent emails (31%) and accessed social media (26%) via their mobiles in Europe is lower, but I’d imagine significant variations if broken down country by country.  However it is worth noting that in absolute numbers, 25.5 million Europeans access a blog or social network via their smartphones every day

10 – Though it bases this statement largely on US figures, Comscore tells us that smartphones are “poised to become consumers’ favourite shopping companion in 2012.”   One in five U.S. smartphone owners took a picture of a product while in store and nearly the same number texted or called family or friends about a specific product.

Women in particular were more likely to make shopping a ‘social’ experience, with 24% taking pictures, while men were more likely to use their phones for information gathering, such as scanning a barcode or comparing prices.

Finally Comscore has a stat about mobile phone owners who scanned QR codes – in the US it was 20.3% and in the UK 12.3%.  Of course, that stat doesn’t tell us anything about their experience when they scanned it (or indeed, whether they scanned successfully)

Related articles

• comScore: Japan, An Early Mover In Mobile, Trails The U.S., Others In Smartphones (techcrunch.com)
• ComScore report finds 42 percent of US mobile users have smartphones, Android … – Engadget (engadget.com)
• Consumers Going Mobile in Retail Stores, comScore (beet.tv)
• ComScore’s 2012 Mobile Future Whitepaper Highlights (tomorrowsocial.com)
• Smartphones Become the Go-To Tool for Shoppers (entrepreneur.com)

How many brands would be brave enough to cut half of their social media followers, losing the ones who hadn’t engaged with them for months?  That’s exactly what is happening with many core Instagram users at the moment.

One of the many things that fascinates me about Instagram is the way a unique sub-culture and series of communities have grown up around the network in a relatively short (18 months) period of time (see an article I wrote for The Wall on the subject).

Most recently, there has been a trend among core Instagramers to do something interesting around their follower numbers.   Instead of looking at the vanity metric of a large follower total, many are actually shedding followers.   I’m one of those that did this.  I used a 3rd party tool to lose 300+ followers, bringing me down from the psychologically important 1000 follower milestone, back down to 700.

Before moving onto why that is, it is worth outlining a group of services that now exist giving you intelligence on your Instagram account.

Statigram
Statigram is not only one of the main free web services (along with Webstagram and Ink361) that allow you to view Instagram images online, it also (as the name implies) provides basic metrics around your account.

This includes best time to post per day, most successful filters (assuming you actually use IG filters and not 3rd party apps), a like and comment average, and a list of your most engaged followers.   Useful info if you are running a company Instagram account, as well as a personal one.

Statigram has also started to run ads supporting Instagram competitions, we noticed Ford Fiesta using it to bring their campaign to the attention of Instagramers.

InstaPop
This iPhone application will tell you the minimum number of likes and comments you will probably need to get on the popular page / tab on Instagram.  It compares the least popular image on the popular page with your most recent post in terms of likes, comments and the amount of time the post has been live.

InstaFrManager
This is an iPhone app that looks at your posts over the last 40 days and gives you a league table of your most engaged and least engaged followers based on comments and likes.   A lot of Instagramers have been using it to get rid of dormant or ‘ghost’ followers.   However, more recently they’ve been turning their attention to a tool that does the job automatically, namely:

IGexorcist (igexorcist.com)
IGexorcist is a free web-based tool that gets rid of inactive followers.   Give it access to your account and it then shows you how many followers haven’t liked or commented on any of your images for the past 60, 90, 120 and 180 days.   You can then completely purge the total, bringing your follower number down.

On my part, it told me I had 307 inactive followers over 180 days and 368 over 60 days.   As an aside that told me that most IG users in my circles are active, and (given the fact that the 60 and 180 day totals weren’t vastly different) that if you stick with Instagram for a month or so, you are likely to keep going.

IGexorcist is popular because it automates the process of blocking and then unblocking a follower.

Why does it go through these two steps?  Because the block / unblock route is the only real way to let a follower loose.   And most committed Instagramers don’t do the first part of that and just block because of a belief that Instagram still counts a blocked follower as a follower when deciding who gets onto the popular page.

Which brings us onto the concept of ghost followers and ‘popping.’   Many Instagram biographies now include the words ‘no ghost followers.’

A ghost follower is someone who never interacts with you.  That might be someone who has left Instagram.   Or it may be, much like you still see on Twitter, Instagram users who follow huge numbers of other users en masse with the aim of in turn acquiring a big follower number.

Popping is Instagram speak for getting on the popular page.   Doing so generally depends on having a large number of likes and comments in a very short (less than 15 mins) period of time, hence groups exist to deliberately members “pop.”   In addition to having a concentrated number of likes for each post, most Instagramers believe that a smaller follower total gives you an advantage.

As a result,  there is no benefit in having an artificially large follower number that is exactly that – just a number.

Though most brands now do understand the importance of a committed follower, the philosophy of the big number is still alive and well.   By contrast, its interesting to see a group of core users of a social network embrace the concept of (as the IGexorcist site puts it) people over numbers.

Related articles

• Instagram 2.1 Fixes Almost Everything That Was Horrible About 2.0 Update [Revew] (cultofmac.com)
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• Get to Know Your Instagram Metrics: 5 Key Features of Statigram (likeable.com)

Comscore and Telefonica (the European telecoms giant that owns 02) have come out with a study about the use of smartphones and the Internet in Europe.

The research tells us that in the UK (48%) and Spain (48%) almost half of us are now smartphone (as opposed to ‘feature phone’) owners.   Across the five biggest EU states, the average is 42%.

Other key findings are as follows:

Android leads in phone sales, Apple dominates in mobile web traffic

Who is bigger, Android or Apple?  That depends how you look at it.

In terms of smartphone ownership, there are certainly more Android (28%) phones and iPhones (21% of the smartphone market).   Indeed phones running Google’s mobile operating system are on the verge of overtaking Symbian (i.e. current and previous generation Nokia).

However in terms of actual mobile operating systems, Apple iOS is in front, 30% to 27%.  This is because Apple’s mobile operating system is also on later generation iPod Touches and of course iPads.

Crucially Apple devices account for 62% of mobile digital traffic in the big EU states compared to 22% for Android.   Personally I think that is because someone walking into a shop wanting to buy “a phone” is now likely to be steered towards one of the cheaper Android devices.   However someone buying an iPhone is doing so consciously and at least in part because of the array of apps on offer.

That’s a stat worth bearing in mind when skewing mobile campaigns towards different devices.   It is also worth noting recent US stats showing that the iPhone 4S helped Apple overtake Android in the American market in Q4.

Finally, while the Internet in Europe is now female dominated, Comscore says that most smartphone (56.3%) owners are men.   There is evidence from other research that Android is very male biased, while iPhones have a more even male / female spread.

21% of UK web traffic to family sites from mobiles

The share of web traffic from mobile devices is still relatively small, 5% (7.7% in the UK).   However, remember that % is skewed by the amount of web traffic coming from office based PCs.

Also the picture is very different when you look at different categories.   In the UK, a quarter of traffic to automotive sites came from smartphones, while tablets and phones together accounted for 21%of visits to family and parenting websites (this includes kids sites like Disney).

Target smartphone and tablet owners in the evening 

As the above table shows, PC traffic is highest during the day, while smartphone and (especially) tablet traffic peaks in the evening, as well as during peak commuter hours (8am and 6pm).   Something to bear in mind if running a campaign targeted at users of mobile only networks such as Instagram.

Shoppers use their phones while in store

Research in the summer showed that 1/4 of online shopping conversations actually happen in-store l.  In fact, over a fifth of European smartphone owners have taken a product photo in-store, while 1/10 sent it to their family and friends.

Surprisingly, given the mixed evidence about the adoption rate of QR codes, 10.9% scanned a barcode in store.   Meanwhile 14.9% of German and 13.2% of UK smartphone owners claim to have actually scanned a QR or barcode of any description – it doesn’t actually say whether these scans were successful or not.

Finally, over one in twenty  (6.4%) smartphone owners have compared produce prices while in a store, a stat that is only going to increase given apps such as the Amazon price comparison one, where you scan a product in store and get the equivalent Amazon price

Related articles

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• Apple Back On Top As Bestselling Smartphone In The U.S. (paidcontent.org)
• Apple Surpasses Android To Become Reigning Champion In The U.S. [Report] (cultofmac.com)
• Q4 data shows that iPhone beat out all Android phones (electronista.com)

There is a wealth of research showing that social media users in emerging markets are proportionally more active  than their Western counterparts.    For example, Indonesia, Russia and Egypt all have 80%+ of their internet populations on social media.   Meanwhile, Israeli and Russian social media users spend twice as much time on those channels than people in the UK and US.

A latest stat released by Instagramers, a global Instagram community with 240 local chapters celebrating its 1st birthday today, shows the same holds true on the photo-sharing network.     The three most active Instagramer communities measured in photos tagged and uploaded are the Philippines, Brazil and Turkey.

No, this doesn’t look at actual user numbers but it certainly measures engagement.   Others groups in the top ten are actually sub-sets of the main country groups, such as Igersistanbul (57k photos) and Igersaopaolo (36k tagged images).   A dynamic list can be found on Statigram (one of several web based services for viewing Instagram posts).

Related articles

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• Why Join Instagram? (socialmediatoday.com)
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Stats of the month – January

To kick off the New Year, here’s the second in my series of presentations about ten stats of the (previous) month.     Each slide has an embedded link for further information, and I’ve also included the text and link for each slide below:

 1 – Social networking has become the world’s most popular online activity

It accounts for 20% of Internet time and social networking sites now reach 82% of the world’s online population (Comscore)

In fact, there are now more Facebook users than Buddhists! (Rune Leth Andersen)

2 – At the same time, social media may be reaching saturation point in many markets

“Social is running out of hours.  Social is also running out of people” - George Colony, Forrester

Forrester says social media only slightly less popular than shopping and childcare

3 – As a result, the growth area for social remains emerging markets

According to Pew Research, out of 20 countries surveyed, the top three for the % of the total population on social media were Israel (53%), USA (50%) and the UK (50%)

However, if you look at the % of the Internet population on social media, the top three are Indonesia (86%), Russia (84%) and Egypt (82%)

4 – Facebook may have the numbers, but Twitter shapes the news agenda

Twitter was the most cited social network in the media in 2011, beating Facebook in 10/12 months – including Sept when Facebook’s new features were launched (Highbeam Research)

5 – The Internet is now Britain’s 2nd biggest news source

According to Oliver & Ohlbaum, 75% use the TV for news, 68% the Internet, 54% newspapers and 33% mobile

6 – Social media continues to chip away at traditional media use

In the UK, 18% read a printed national newspaper less due to social media use.  In Australia the figure is 21% and in the US it is 15% (Ofcom)

7 – Younger and female users of social media use it as a prime news source

51% of 18-24 year olds in the UK, 53% in the US, 61% in France and 61% in Italy use social channels for breaking news (Ofcom)

8- Social TV continues to rise in importance

More proof that social media and TV can effectively work hand in hand:

38% of Internet consumers have used a social network to recommend a TV programme and 29% often discuss what they are watching on TV in real-time online (Motorola)

9 – Apple dominates the mobile web

61% of European non PC Internet traffic comes from Apple ‘iDevices’, while in the US 92% of mobile purchases were made via iPhones and iPads (Comscore / RichRelevance)

10 – Instagram on track to becoming the world’s biggest mobile social network

Overtaking Foursquare (SocialFresh)

The December stats of the month can be found here

Related articles

• Vivek Wadhwa, WaPo: Social media will become a feature rather than the “big thing” (nextlevelofnews.com)
• Prediction #1: Social media slides down the pedestal (swordandthescript.com)
• Top 10 Social Networking Resolutions for Business in 2012 (ipwatchdog.com)
• The State of Social Media and Social Media Marketing in 2012 (slideshare.net)
• Surprise hit Pinterest a top 10 most-trafficked social network | Logicamp (logicamp.wordpress.com)

There may be more Android phones on the market than iPhones, but research shows that it is Apple users that dominate the mobile web.

Back in November, Comscore told us that Apple’s iOS operating system installed on iPhones, iPod Touches and iPads accounted for 61.1% of European non PC Internet traffic, compared to 20.9% for Android devices

Now comes an even more telling statistic – ecommerce company RichRelevance found that iPhone and iPad users accounted for 92% of (US) mobile purchases made in December (via BGR)

The research also found that the average ‘iDevice’ user who buys online, spends more than the average Android user – $123 to $101.

As a result, the ‘who is bigger’ question may be the wrong one to ask (you also get different answers if you compare operating systems as opposed to smartphones)

The evidence is that whatever the bells and whistles that now exist on Android phones, Android users are more likely to use their devices for communication while Apple users do use their devices as mini mobile computers.

Something to bear in mind if you are basing your mobile marketing strategy purely on device sales – basing it on behaviour would make more sense.

Image – nrkbeta 

Related articles

• Android Vs iOS Should Be Fun to Watch Moving Forward (marketingpilgrim.com)
• Apple iOS, Android account for 10%+ of retail web visits (liesdamnedliesstatistics.com)
• New studies highlight app gap between Apple, Android (blogs.siliconvalley.com)
• Google Activates 700000 Android Devices a Day – Forbes (forbes.com)
• iOS users rule mobile shopping, spend 19% more than Androids (electronista.com)

Open Apple’s app store and you’re presented with 300+ (by my count) QR code readers of various descriptions.   Look at ads on public transport, on posters and in magazines and they are there.   But are they catching on, or do they remain a gimmick?

As with so many things, it comes down to how you read the statistics.

Writing on CNN.com, Amy Gahran is a QR sceptic and quotes the stat from Archrival that though 80% of US college students – a demographic you imagine to be most familiar with tech innovations – had seen QR codes and knew roughly what they were, only 20% were able to successfully scan one .

Amy says that 75% of students said they wouldn’t be scanning QR codes in future….which still means 1/4 are receptive to it.

Forrester says that overall QR code adoption rates are low – 5% of US adults.   But that”s 5x more than in 2010 (1%), and among smartphone owners the adoption rate is 15% (via Read Write Web).

QR codes are also an area where Android users are in front – 23% of US Android users have scanned, compared to 19% of US iPhone users.   That’s significant as research also shows that mobile web views come disproportionately from Apple ‘iDevices’

Meanwhile Sam Beckbessinger in memeburn  lists “five reasons why QR codes are – mostly – a crock.”

Sam echoes Amy Gahran’s point about QR code confusion, citing a study carried out in one of the most tech literate cities in the World – San Francisco.     Apparently, only 11% were able to correctly identify them.    However, another 29% said it was “some barcode thingy”, and I’d say that’s still significant – knowing the correct name for a QR code is less important than the realisation that it exists to be scanned.

Personally I think QR Codes have potential but both Amy Gahran’s CNN piece and Sam Beckbessinger’s memeburn give good reasons why it is under performing as a marketing mechanic.

They’re in the wrong places says Sam Beckbessigner.   Indeed they are.   I’m amazed by the number of ads with QR codes I see on the London Underground.   Putting aphone over a stranger’s head to scan an ad is the last thing most people will do, assuming they have an app installed allowing them to do so of course.

Which brings us onto the point that certainly from the QR codes I’ve seen, almost none spell out what you need to do.   That starts with needing to download an app.

Then, says Sam, the content is often poor (it leads you to a website, and often not a mobile optimised one) and there is no incentive to scan.

Those points can be turned around into recommendations for anyone intending to use QR Codes in their marketing.  Namely:

1 – Think about the content and give people something they won’t get simply by typing a URL into their mobile browser.   Some kind of special incentive?   A piece of content the can’t get elsewhere?  A short video or piece of audio content?

2 – Use QR codes in situations where people have time and (if they need to) a wi-fi or 3G connection to download an app.   Magazines are good.    So are eye-level posters in shopping centres.   Or indeed airports and train station waiting rooms (Rabbit client Gatwick Airport has previously used 1D barcodes – Stickybits)

3 – Most importantly, be crystal clear about *what* you need to do to scan that code.   Spell out the need for an app and don’t assume people know what it is.  By introducing them to the concept, you could capitalise on the novelty factor and significantly up engagement rates

Image – Clever Cupcakes 

Related articles

• QR Codes Gone Wild (greatfinds.icrossing.com)
• Why QR codes aren’t catching on (cnn.com)
• QR Codes (twowritingteachers.wordpress.com)
• Now You Can Get a QR Code Haircut (bellasugar.com)
• How do you create a QR code for your website (wiki.answers.com)

More than half of UK mobile users that access social networks from their phones do so almost every day.   This is according to Comscore, which says that overall around 35% of the UK mobile phone population uses social networks from their phones.

Note that around 44% of UK mobile users have a smartphone, with iPhone users most likely to go online.   The overlap between smartphone and mobile social network users won’t be exact, but it will be pretty strong.

As a result, the conclusion is that smartphone ownership is increasing mobile social network use.   And that use is by and large heavy, rather than infrequent.

Related articles

• The rise of mobile social networking (conversations.nokia.com)
• 55m people using social networks via mobile in ‘EU5′ nations (mobile-ent.biz)