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Mobile content easier to consume, recall

Lauren Kate Rawlins
By Lauren Kate Rawlins, ITWeb digital and innovation contributor.
Johannesburg, 05 Feb 2016
Research shows mobile users will retain information seen in adverts after less than a second of exposure.
Research shows mobile users will retain information seen in adverts after less than a second of exposure.

Popular social networks, Facebook and Twitter, conducted research into how people consume content on mobile devices and found these users are able to consume content faster and recall it accurately.

The findings were discussed in an op-ed published on AdAge by Facebook's director of product, Fidji Simo, and Twitter's global ad research director, Jeffrey Graham.

Earnings results released this year from Facebook and Google show both companies are focusing on mobile growth and revenue. Most Facebook users (90%) now access the network via mobile.

This means marketers, for big and small businesses, who use social media as a tool, need to focus on how their audiences are viewing and consuming their content.

Key findings of the research showed Facebook users consumed mobile content faster than on desktop: 1.7 seconds versus 2.5 seconds.

Twitter and Facebook found the recall of messages and adverts can occur in very short amounts of time, sometimes within the first second. According to independent Fors-Marsh tests, people can recall mobile news feed content at a statistically significant rate after 0.25 seconds of exposure.

In a separate study conducted with Nielsen, Facebook and Twitter found significant ad recall of video on mobile at the one-second threshold, meaning that after only one second, ad recall goes up enough to be attributed to exposure.

When people watch the first three seconds of a video on Facebook, 65% of those people go on to watch at least 10 seconds of the video, and 45% make it to 30 seconds.

The social network announced last week 100 million hours of video are now being watched daily on Facebook.

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