Ready for the Thumb Tribe?

If you’re building a consumer experience, I hope you’re familiar with the Thumb Tribe because that is where your future customers are. I’m sure you’ve noticed that the younger generations are heavy mobile users, but you may not be aware of how extreme it is unless you’ve looked at your users’ demographics and analytics lately.

These two screenshots are from a recent Facebook ad that I was running to promote an event with a young music artist. As you can see in the demographic data, the audience was quite young.

Young online audience

But, notice in this second breakdown that Desktop computers don’t really even exist for these young users. All of the engagement is mobile.

 

Mobile ad engagement with young people

Two other key things to point out:

First, the reach on Instagram is higher than the Facebook mobile news feed. My own children confirm this trend. They really don’t use Facebook very much, instead choosing to spend their time on Instagram and Snapchat.

Second point, even though the reach on Instagram is better than Facebook, the conversion was much, much higher on Facebook. My ad on Instagram (a photo of the singer) received an extraordinary number of likes, way beyond anything I post on Facebook or Twitter. But, the actual clickthrough on the ad’s button to my website was a fraction of the clickthrough on the Facebook ad. The CTR on Facebook was almost 13x the Instagram CTR.

My point with all of this? I still see too many websites that really aren’t optimized for mobile. Most have bothered to at least generate a mobile version of the site, but the experience is terrible and often incomplete, which inevitably forces you to click that little link in the footer that takes you to the full site. Then you get the joy of pinching and zooming your way around that. Check your own analytics and demographics data. Find out who your customers are and how they are accessing your website. Better yet, do some targeted advertising like I did and find out who should be your customers, but they are not because you simply don’t exist where they live.