Your company’s webmaster has probably ensured that your website is optimized for viewing on mobile devices, but is mobile-friendliness the focus of your social media strategy? It should be.
95% of Facebook users access the platform from a mobile device. A large portion of Instagram’s functionality can only be utilized via mobile. For these reasons, device-appropriate content is critical to your social success. Here are four tips to ensure you’re approaching content with mobile in mind:
1. Design for mobile first
Making sure that your social content displays well on mobile devices means ensuring text is easily legible, within content-safe areas, and limited to only the most important details. With social restrictions like Facebook’s 20% text rule in place, it’s much easier to begin crafting content for social publishing and adding details for print or web publications later.
A great social experience begins with clear, clutter-free content. If your posts contain busy images, small, pixelated fonts, or unintentionally cropped photos, your mobile visitors won’t stick around to read what you have to say.
2. Keep things brief
In today’s scroll-addicted world, marketers have only a brief moment to capture their audience’s interest. If you’ve designed well enough to do so, the next step is to quickly convey your message before that attention span dissipates.
Keeping descriptions to a minimum not only ups the likelihood of your posts being read to completion, but ensures that they’re being seen at all. On many mobile apps, long text blocks are shortened with a ‘read more’ anchor that could hide important aspects of your messaging. On Instagram, for example, that cut off occurs around the 125-character mark. We recommend stopping at 90 and incorporating an emoji to be safe.
3. Consider accessibility
In a research study, Facebook found that people with visual impairments used the platform just as much as those who do not. Applying alternative text to your visual content, and captions for those who are hearing impaired, ensures you aren’t alienating a portion of your mobile audience.
4. Test everything
Any time you branch out to try a new graphic layout, video style, or inactive piece of content, you need to test it. Using a personal or experimental account, post to your timeline, story, or grid and then view the content from a variety of devices to determine compatibility. We’re here to help if you need recommendations on which dimensions to use.