As more and more consumers turn to mobile devices for their daily news fix, publishers without a mobile strategy are in danger of being left behind. But mobile success goes beyond simply optimizing content for viewing on smartphones. Readers today are spending most of their time inside apps – 86%, according to mobile analytics company Flurry – and publishers must take a good app experience into account when developing their mobile strategy.
Because app development is a relatively new area for publishers, mistakes can happen. Understanding these mistakes and how to prevent them is key to growing and nurturing a mobile audience.
Dreaming of “Infinity”
Because apps are contained, many publishers see the ideal as getting readers to open them and never leave. But successful news apps like Circa and Yahoo have found that presenting their content in digest form provides readers with a better user experience, according to a recent Digiday article. By presenting news in this format, it’s easy for readers to read the news and move on with their day, rather than getting stuck in an endless loop of links. Additionally, concise content is a smart choice for mobile audiences, who are often on the go.
Scheduling Concerns
Many publishers find that desktop consumption of their content is highest during the 9-to-5 working hours and that mobile consumption increases in the early morning and evening. As such, publishers should take advantage of analytics tools that let them measure engagement and schedule content appropriately. If a publisher finds that most of its mobile traffic comes after 10 pm, for example, they should schedule their content to be pushed live to the mobile experience at that time.
Overdoing It with Apps
Media companies have the potential to offer countless mobile apps to their customers – one for news, one for sports, another for weather and so on. But many consumers find too many options overwhelming and will choose to go with a different brand entirely. Publishers are more likely to win long-term engagement by offering a single app that allows users to intuitively access different categories of content.
Abusing Mobile Notifications
Push notifications are a great way to drive traffic to an app because they provide immediate engagement and entice readers to click through to the full story. But publishers should be wary of sending notifications every time there’s a development in a news story. Push notifications can quickly become overwhelming for a reader and lead them to ignore the app or delete it entirely.