Facebook's Focus on Mobile is Paying Off

If you don’t think that your ability to reach customers via mobile is important to your business, think again. As the recent American Consumer Satisfaction Index on e-business, and social media giant Facebook, both illustrate, mobile has become a key – in many cases the key – method of communication for many customers. And it’s become a key growth driver for many companies, including Facebook.

Successful mobile strategies by social media entities, namely Facebook, have enabled the social media category within the ACSI’s e-business focus to go from bottom-of-the-barrel ranking to a very respectable collective score of 74 on a 100-point scale. That means the social media category within the ACSI is now one point ahead of the Internet news and opinion websites category, which saw a 1.4 percent decline since the publication of the last index.

Facebook last year registered an ACSI score of 67. This year it’s at 75, a 12 percent improvement.

As Claes Fornell, chairman and founder of ACSI, noted: “Today’s consumers practically live on their smartphones, and mobile compatibility is increasingly important to customer satisfaction. Social media has made strides in improving the mobile experience, particularly through mobile apps that can be optimized by operating system to ensure better compatibility.”

Indeed, as Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg noted in the company’s fourth quarter 2015 earnings call, capitalizing on the shift to mobile has been one of the organization’s three key focus areas (the other two are video and making its advertising capabilities more relevant).

The Facebook mobile strategy seems to be working. As Facebook CFO David Wehner said in a CNBC interview televised July 29, 844 million people are using Facebook daily on their mobiles; that’s up 29 percent year over year. And Facebook didn’t have a mobile business three years ago.

“Mobile’s been just a phenomenal growth driver for us,” Wehner said.