The quick ascent of mobile marketing was clear at the recent annual MobileBeat conference, which was expanded to a two-day format to accommodate more speakers and prolong networking opportunities. At the event, Facebook’s head of mobile products, Erick Tseng, spoke about the social site’s new approach to its open graph – the platform that extends its social content on the web. The open graph is going mobile.
Compete research shows that social media usage from smartphones is on the rise. Now, the social site will better cater to these users by moving away from a single mobile app approach, turning Facebook into a platform multiple mobile apps to be distributed.
At the conference, Tseng explained that this will let developers take advantage of the open graph to reach Facebook users, reports Venture Beat. Though Tseng said Facebook isn’t rushing to get advertisers on its mobile apps, this new platform could ultimately help businesses boost brands among on-the-go consumers through location-based mobile apps developed for the site.
Tseng believes Facebook’s new mobile platform will improve the geo-social location market by making it more social. “If you can actually layer on top of [location] some kind of social intelligence – not just the fact that I’m near Starbucks, but the fact that 30 of my friends really [liked] this frappuccino over the last couple months – I’ve got an interesting use case,” VentureBeat quotes him as saying.
Thus, geo-social location apps developed for Facebook could build on the profitable popularity of Twitter Places and Foursquare and one up them by arming location updates with recommendations from Facebook friends. This could be a big deal for marketers as nearly one-third of geo-social networkers who also use traditional social sites visit the pages or profiles of companies they learn about through the channel, according to research from media firm Interpret.
