Mobile Optimization Key for Bloggers

Lawyers and law firms publish content as a way to build relationships and grow their reputation.
With more people consuming content they discover via social media, law firms look to social media as a distribution and discovery vehicle for their blog posts and content.

How are people discovering and reading this legal content? It’s increasingly on a mobile device.
Shareaholic, a social discovery and sharing platform, just released a report on Facebook referral traffic. More than half of social traffic from Facebook now consists of mobile referrals.
And the growth of mobile is shocking. The percentage of people accessing Facebook via mobile has gone up by almost three times since just last September.


Sharing referrals via Facebook has also been going up for some time.


Look at the numbers from Facebook’s latest quarterly earnings report shared by TNW’s Emil Protalinski (@EPro), my source on the Shareholic report:

1.23 billion monthly active users, 945 million monthly active mobile users, 757 million daily active users, and 556 million daily active mobile users. The biggest jump was naturally for mobile users, up 39 percent year-over-year for monthly and up 49 percent year-over-year for daily.

76.83 percent of Facebook’s total monthly userbase and 73.44 percent of its daily userbase accesses the social network from a mobile device. Last but certainly not least, the company revealed last quarter that more than half of its advertising revenue now stems from mobile (53 percent). (emphasis added)

I am not saying that most of your referral traffic to your law blog or legal content published elsewhere is coming from Facebook.

I am saying that if you rely on social media for your content to be shared with others who trust the ‘sharing party,’ you need to understand that a good number of the people referred to your content will be on a mobile device. And this number will be increasing.

Whether referred from Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, or Google+, people looking to read your content will be on a mobile device.
Shareaholic’s Danny Wong (@dannywong1190) addresses what this means for marketers like law firms.

Responsive design and mobile site optimization are more important than ever.
Earlier this month, Nielsen published a report titled, The Digital Consumer. Revealing growth in mobile usage, it’s hard not to recognize with our obsession with our palm-sized devices.
Effectively, if your business or blog isn’t very usable on a mobile phone, you’ll want to invest more resources into building a mobile experience your visitors can’t get enough of…

Will there be a cost for law firms in updating to custom responsive design? Yes. There will likely be costs in the years ahead in upgrading to something else.
But with the growing trend in mobile, a trend we are not going to see reverse, having an eloquent presentation of your blog and other legal content is critical for your brand and image.
Image courtesy of Flickr by Jeffrey Zeldman.