Engage your mobile audience with links that work for them

January 27, 2011

Engage your mobile audience with links that work for them

Last week, I wrote about how missing links hurt online news. This week, here are a few do’s and don’ts for making sure that links to your site play nice with cell phones—especially non-smartphones…

By Amy Gahran

First, a little context: A feature phone is what the mobile industry calls non-smartphones. These are simpler, cheaper devices that don’t run native apps—but they do usually have simple web browsers, as well as text messaging, e-mail, and social media access.

Currently, about 70% of mobile users rely on feature phones. And although smartphones are getting more common, I expect that feature phones will remain popular for at least a few years because they’re so much cheaper up front and over time than smartphones—and it’s still a rough economy out there.

Not all feature phone users actually browse the mobile web or have access to high-speed mobile broadband networks. Nevertheless, if you do your own local mobile market research survey (and you should), you may be surprised how popular mobile web surfing is among feature phone users. For example, here in Oakland, CA, I found that 80% of local mobile users access the web from their phones daily or most days—even though only 30% of mobile users here rely on smartphones.

Feature phone users represent a huge and largely untapped potential news audience that news organizations can start engaging today. You don’t have to wait to start building this part of your business—and compared to building and maintaining native smartphone apps, it’s far less costly and technically complex to give feature phone users an engaging experience that can support your news organizations’ brand and core products.

So…

1. DO get a “feature phone” with a simple web browser (“microbrowser”) and slow data network connection. This will allow you to test how well your site (and links to it) function on the type of device that the vast majority of your current potential mobile audience is probably using right now.

A good bet is to choose an inexpensive “candybar” or “slider” style handset, with a small screen and a full keyboard with tiny keys. These are available on month-to-month, no-contract or prepaid plans from many carriers (especially discount carriers).

Once you get this feature phone, sign up for all of your site’s e-mail and text alerts. Also, use Twitter, Facebook, and any other social media services accessible on that phone to follow your news org. This way you’ll get a feel for which links, pages, and servies are or are not working well for this part of your mobile audience.

2. DON’T force feature phone users to remember a special address for your mobile site. Most daily news orgs now have a mobile-friendly version of their web site that displays well enough on a microbrowser. However, users can typically only access this site by entering a URL with a special prefix, such as m.chicagotribune.com. Don’t bet that most feature phone users will know, or remember, to do this consistently—or that they’ll bookmark your mobile address on their phone.

If they try to go to your regular site, and it won’t load, they probably won’t ever want to visit you again. Mobile users are especially intolerant of frustration.

So have your site administrator implement auto-detection for your mobile site. (The geeky details.) This process recognizes mobile visitors and routes them to your mobile-friendly site. You can configure auto-detection to route the common smartphone platforms (iOS, Android, RIM, etc.) to the full version of your site.

Make sure your auto-detection routes mobile visitors to the mobile version of the page they requested—not just your mobile-friendly home page. This is important especially to serve mobile visitors who have clicked on a link which they received on their feature phone via text message, e-mail, or social media.

3. DO put your site search engine near the top of your mobile site’s home page. Navigation is difficult on feature phones, and often mobile users just want to search rather than browse. Don’t bury this field at the bottom, or neglect to include it at all.

If you offer SMS text alerts for breaking news or top stories, here are some additional tips:

1. DO include direct links to specific news stories in your text alerts, not just a generic link to your home page. Mobile users may not click on the link the moment you send it, so by the time they click they may not see the referenced story on your home page.

This makes it especially important to include in your past stories links to find updates, which often can be automatically generated through your content management system if you’re using a common tag for those related stories.

2. DO set up your own link shortener (or use a Bit.ly account) to generate short versions of links to your stories that you use in text alerts. This not only saves precious space; it creates a trackable measure of clickthroughs to your site, so you can test the effectiveness of various approaches to text alert content and format.

Also, arrange with text alert advertisers (if you have any) to let you generate the shortened link to their mobile-friendly landing page that will run in the text message. That way, you’ll get to track clickthroughs to measure the effectiveness of this offering—valuable information for improving and selling these ads.

The News Leadership 3.0 blog is made possible by a grant to USC Annenberg from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

By Amy Gahran, 01/27/11 at 5:30 pm
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