By Alan Coleman on 20 Mar 2013
As most of our loyal readers will know, we have spoken lots recently about mobile advertising, mobile usage and multi-device usage. We may as well continue with our current obsessions! Social Media: A Holy Show Last week saw the appointment of a new Pope, Pope Francis. Of course, a social media frenzy took place around the appointment – which was, of course, expected. Twitter estimated that around 130,000 tweets per minute were posted about the Pope Francis around the time of his election. This, given the fact that the election was not a prime-time event, was described as being "very high". By early Wednesday afternoon, an estimated 2 million tweets had been sent. This tweeting frenzy was reflected in Twitter trends, with Pope-related hashtags trending worldwide*. There was a similar story over on Facebook where discussion terms such as Pope, Jorge Bergoglio and the Vatican were popular. As of 3.30pm P.T. mentions of Bergoglio (the new pope’s last name) were up by 3.7 million percent*. *Stats as reported in CNN Technology: Lighting up an Audience Aside from all these stats, we have to remember what is driving this social media behaviour: technology, technology acceptance, changing technological behaviour…whatever you want to call it. This basically sums up what we want to say:
This shows the dynamic and tech-laden environment we are living in today. In just eight years, an audience has been lit up by technology. By the time the next pope comes along, we cannot help but wonder what this audience will look like. Will there even be a physical audience? And of course it’s not just the Pope's audience that is being lit up by technology – audiences all across the globe are also being lit up – in retail, tourism, B2B…everywhere! Tablet Ownership and the Need for Mobile Advertising One surprising statistic that we saw recently from Amárach Research is that tablet ownership in Ireland is forecast to increase by 20% in 2013, with HALF of homes expecting to have a tablet by the end of 2013. This places increased urgency on the need for companies to invest in mobile-friendly websites and targeted online and mobile advertising. We are sure that the Popes election is just one example of many striking comparisons which can be made between years gone by and a new technology-driven 2013. We would love to hear other peoples’ examples. We may even publish the best ones! Why not tweet us your best examples?
