5 Mobile Apps to Boost Small Business Productivity. This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business. When you operate a small business, the last thing you want to do is waste precious time. Luckily, mobile apps for Apple and Android devices can help simplify many of your day-to-day business operations. The only problem is, who has time to search for and test these apps in the first place? Rest assured, we have you covered. These five mobile apps will save you time and keep you more organized than ever before — whether you're searching for a password management system or a way to log in to your home computer remotely. Test them out and let us know what you think! In the comments, link to any other helpful productivity apps that would benefit small business owners.
More Small Business Resources From OPEN Forum: 5 Paradoxes Shaping the Future of Mobile Commerce. Igor Faletski is the CEO of Mobify, a web platform that optimizes ecommerce and publishing sites for mobile and powers more than 20,000 sites. Remember when it took 23 clicks to find movie showtimes on your mobile phone? While that may seem like an eon ago, in reality it’s just been a few short years. The mobile evolution has been advancing at a break-neck pace. “Mobile is ramping up faster than any other technology we have seen in the past,” says Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins. With that growth comes a new set of user behaviors and consumer trends. 1. My company powers about 20,000 ecommerce sites. While multiple factors contribute to this data, the most important may be the power of the tablet, which has quickly emerged as the third digital screen in consumers' lives, in addition to desktops and smartphones.
IPad users generally have higher education and higher income than general internet users. The moral of the story for retailers? 2. 3. 4. 5. Yes, we’re living in an app culture. 3 Tips for Better Mobile SEO. Jason Taylor is the vice president of platform strategy at Usablenet. Usablenet’s platform powers the mobile sites of 20% of the Fortune 1000, including Estée Lauder, Hilton, Delta, Victoria’s Secret, FedEx, ASOS and others. Follow @Usablenet on Twitter.
Google’s Eric Schmidt recently noted that mobile search is growing much faster than desktop search. As mobile increasingly becomes a primary gateway to the Internet, it is crucial for companies to incorporate forward-thinking SEO practices into their mobile strategies to ensure their mobile sites are easily detected by search engines and found by consumers. More than 60% of consumers search for brands from mobile devices before purchasing, and another 49% of mobile searchers made a mobile purchase in the past six months. Businesses must view mobile as a significant piece of their overall marketing campaigns that can drive substantial traffic and increase revenue. 1. 2. 3. The Future of Mobile Search Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Palto. Create A Mobile App And Increase Your Visibility. We’re all well aware that mobile is the future. 35% of American adults own smartphones, and that number is constantly on the rise. Equally important is the fact that app use has outstripped mobile browsing on mobile platforms by a margin of 81 minutes a day to 74 minutes a day on the web.
It isn’t a huge difference, but the trend is very much toward app usage, with a 91% increase in app usage year-over-year, according to analytics firm, Flurry. I Have a Website. What Can I Do to Go Mobile? Most companies now have websites, and if you have a mobile version, you’re off to a good start. There are a number of tools designed to help non-developer create apps, or let developers create apps in the programming language they’re most familiar with and convert it to the appropriate format for iOS or Android. For programmers, the options include Appcelerator, MotherApp, and PhoneGap . Benefits Of Apps Include Search And Branding You don’t care about Android Market or the App Store? Mobile social media: Four tactics for mobile sharing. Social networking via mobile devices is growing each day. How well does your social strategy incorporate mobile? Do you access Facebook or Twitter from your mobile phone? If not, you’re the exception. New studies show the number of people using their mobile phones to connect on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn is growing rapidly and becoming the dominant way to access social networks.
A report from comScore found that 72m Americans accessed social media from their mobile devices in August, a 37% increase compared from the prior year. Even more telling is the fact that 50% of these users are using social networks on a daily basis via their mobile device. As expected, the comScore report found Facebook leading the mobile charge with 57m monthly mobile users in the US (a 50% year-over-year increase). Twitter’s mobile user base follows, currently at 13.4m, a staggering 75% increase from last year. Social and mobile are natural partners. 1. The key take-way for marketers? 4. Cowen: Google’s Mobile Ad Revenues Could Surge To $5.8 Billion In 2012. How much does Google make in advertising from mobile? Cowen analyst Jim Friedland estimates that Google is generating $7 per year from each smartphone (and tablet).
This includes both search and display advertising in mobile apps on both Android and iOS (iPhones and iPads). Thanks to the rapid growth in active smart mobile devices worldwide from an estimated 509 million last year to an estimated 914 million in 2012, Google’s mobile ad revenues are expected to more than double from an estimated $2.5 billion last year to $5.8 billion in 2012 (see chart).
As a percentage of Google’s total revenues, Friedland estimates that mobile grew from 3 percent in 2010 to 7 percent last year and will almost double again to 13 percent in 2012. By 2016, he expects mobile to be a $20 billion business for Google, and represent 26 percent of its total revenues. Google doesn’t regularly break out mobile revenues, so estimates are all we have to go by.
5 SEO Tips To Get Mobile Apps Ranked In SERPs. Retail brands with popular mobile apps are benefiting tremendously this holiday season from prominent mobile app visibility in Google’s organic search results. Search for Groupon, eBay, Amazon, Target, QVC or numerous others. Alongside the brand website listing, local listings, and social profiles, searchers are starting to see links to these brands’ iPhone, iPad, and Android app profile pages, right on the first page of Google.
These app page URLs are presenting powerful new opportunities to “occupy” Page 1 of Google SERPs for desktop and mobile searchers, with big payoffs. eBay's iPhone App Page Ranks #2 in Google for "eBay" The opportunity is really the product of a collision between Desktop and Mobile worlds: the explosive popularity of apps are reshaping the Web’s link graph around the App Store and Android Market sites. It comes as no surprise that “Popular Apps” listed in the App Store and Android Market pages are driven by app download volume and rating quality. Here’s the magic.