Content is king when it comes to marketing, but presentation is just as important. High bounce rates and low engagement are symptoms of user experience problems that content can’t solve alone. Brands with lower-than-expected metrics should thoroughly audit their websites to make sure they aren’t turning prospects away. However, social UX is also becoming an important part of connecting companies with leads and customers.
As Brafton reported, Facebook has made attempts to streamline customer transitions from News Feeds to mobile apps with better coding that quickly opens apps and allow seamless movement between them. Recently, the social network published code that allows for deep linking directly from the Facebook mobile app.
Getting in deep with applications
According to the Facebook Developers blog, deep linking directs users to an app’s home screen, but also to actual pages within an app. For example, a real estate company can post content with links to a specific listing within a popular property app, sparing customers and followers the trouble of logging in and navigating through an app’s home screen.
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Mobile UX can be extremely temperamental because users expect effortless transitions and rapid load times. People abandon pages that take more thanfour seconds to load for other options on desktop PCs – and smartphone users are even more likely to bounce. Brands that overlook opportunities to avoid roadblocks and delays between their social posts and content elsewhere on the web run the risk of losing many potential customers.
Apps may soon lead the conversation
Tablet PC orders will outpace desktop computer and laptop purchases by 2015.
Businesses engaged in social marketing might be skeptical that the majority of their prospects and customers are bouncing from networks to apps and back again, but straightforward desktop computing is on the decline. Smartphones are obviously driving a major sea of change in the way people browse the internet, but tablets are also moving toward dominance. In fact, research by Gartner indicates that by 2015, tablet purchases will outpace desktop computers and laptops.
As such, content marketers need to truly begin thinking in terms of a unified internet. Customers spend time in increasingly different worlds, depending on their demographics and web usage patterns, but targeting the networks apps where they consume content is only half the battle: Providing seamless navigation is equally as important. Consider performing an audit on a site’s UX – or social profiles – to make sure there isn’t a bottleneck affecting how many visitors stay and how many bounce to other web presences.
