Smartphone Statistics To Live By In 2020

For the first time since smartphones hit the market in 1994, they’re dominating the internet. In 2019, mobile users made up 52% of global search traffic and 55% of engagements on social media.

Which means a social media strategy that isn’t mobile-first is at least half baked.

To make sure your business is appealing to the mobile crowd, you need to understand exactly how and why people access the internet on their phones.

Then use these insights to answer questions like:

1. How much of my content should be mobile-friendly?
2. Should I run mobile-only campaigns?
3. What types of content do mobile users want to see?
4. What frame of mind are mobile users in when they see my content?

To help you do it, we’ve put together the infographic below. It showcases all of the 2019 smartphones statistics that matter most social media marketers this year.

But first, here’s our take on the top insights from the numbers.

3 Key insights for social media marketers

1. Forget mobile-friendly… go mobile-first

In 2019, more than half of all social media engagement and 64% of Pinterest referral traffic came from a mobile device. Add these figures tond when you consider these stats alongside the push by search engines such as Google to introduce mobile-first indexing, you have a pretty compelling reason to prioritise mobile user’s needs.

How do you do it? Well, you could make your existing content strategy more appealing to mobile users by:

1. Designing mobile-specific landing pages
2. Creating more video content
3. Writing in shorter, punchier paragraphs

And more! Or, you can add some mobile-only approaches to your calendar like mobile apps, games and augmented reality.

2. Create content for distracted and impatient users

Smartphone users expect a site to load within 2 seconds and they’ll decide whether or not they like a page within one. That’s not a lot of time to make a good first impression.

What happens if you don’t meet these expectations?

Mobile users are more likely to bounce than those on other devices. Which means you need to fast-loading online assets that are easy and simple to use.

You can speed up your website by upgrading your web host to a dedicated service, getting rid of junk code, compressing large media files like high-quality images and reducing the number of HTTP requests a page needs to run through as it loads.

3. Global marketing is mobile marketing

Outside of Europe and the US, smartphone penetration is increasing. A mobile phone is no longer a ‘luxury’ item but an essential tool for taking part in modern life.

This shift is clearly reflected in the percentage of phone-based web traffic in emerging economies year-on-year. Almost three-quarters of web traffic in India and 60% in Africa is from a mobile device and those figures keep increasing.

So, if you’re targetting a global audience, tweaking your site to be more responsive and adding a few videos to your articles is just not going to cut it. In 2020, you need to assume that all of your users find and view your content on a phone.

Now let’s now take a look at the figures in full…

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Author bio: “Georgie is a Content Contributor for Hosting Ninja. She is passionate about sharing her enthusiasm for technology through her content writing work, with a mission to help others learn and understand what makes the digital world so successful.”