Mediaboss Marketing

The world of social networking is breaking up. Thanks to a combination of increasing mobility and shifting preferences, people are connecting with each other through "small" apps rather than directly through large social sites at a growing rate.

Social network fragmentation and the rise of small apps has big implications for business, particularly for midsize firms. The mobile space may never be favorable for direct advertising, but well-crafted small social apps can provide firms with a wealth of information about their customers insights that can often be shared with business partners. All of this makes mobile apps an even greater growth area for the midsize IT community.

Social Networking On the Go

As Mike Elgan reports at InfoWorld, mobility has been a primary force in transforming the social media landscape by driving social network fragmentation. In a nutshell, users are increasingly connecting with each other using their mobile devices.

This has posed major challenges to social network giants such as Facebook and Twitter, as mobile ad revenue has not taken off as a revenue source. Moreover, mobile users, surrounded by distractions, favor "small" apps that do a single job easily and well; Snapchat, Instagram and WhatsApp are typical examples.

This does not mean that big social sites are an endangered species. Instead, they are buying up apps and transforming themselves into connection points in the social media ecosystem.

Mobility: Connecting Amid Distractions

The changes in social media can be directly attributed to mobility. Most mobile users are on smartphones, which have little screen space to spare for ads. Mobile users out on the sidewalk have little attention to spare for ads or complex interfaces hence the trend toward small apps.

Though mobile devices and the apps that run on them are a poor platform for ads, they are an excellent platform for gaining customer insight. Localization data adds a whole new layer of understanding about customer behavior and preferences. This data, which most mobile users provide readily and eagerly, can be fed into analytics solutions to draw out insights. Customer data can also provide a revenue stream since it is of potential value to many businesses.

In the app-centric mobility era, mobile apps are a crucial and valuable social business tool for midsize firms seeking to connect with their customers. As traditional IT functions are increasingly shifted to the cloud, midsize IT can focus its attention on the creative process of developing apps that reach out and connect the firm to its mobile customers, even as it connects them with each other.

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Social Network Fragmentation and What It Means for Midsize IT