We recently launched an update to Facebook’s iPhone and iPad apps for iOS. The update makes keeping up with friends faster and easier, and enables brands to engage with people on mobile in richer ways than ever before. Here are three things marketers should know:

 

You can reach your customers at scale with Facebook on mobile

It’s hard to miss the rapid growth of mobile. With 75 percent of the world’s population now on mobile devices and almost 50 percent of US phone subscriptions being for smartphones, reaching your customers on mobile devices has never been more important, and Facebook is a key place people are spending time. More than 540 million people access Facebook on mobile every month. And in the US, Facebook’s mobile users spend over eight hours a month on Facebook, which represents 30 percent of the time spent on the top 10 mobile properties.

 

Facebook targeting options are the same across desktop and mobile 

In addition to leveraging Facebook’s scale to reach people on mobile, you can reach people in highly efficient ways using Facebook’s rich targeting options. Standard demographic targeting is available, but, like on Facebook desktop, Facebook mobile, offers targeting based on likes and interests, connections, activity, education, workplace, relationship status and more. When you set up campaigns on Facebook that are eligible for news feed, some of these impressions will automatically be delivered to mobile if your target audience is logging-on via mobile. You can also target a mobile-only audience with mobile news feed placement using Power Editor and API tools.

 

Your brand can be front and center in mobile news feed 

The news feed is the best place for brands to reach people on Facebook on desktop or mobile because people spend 40 percent of their time on Facebook in news feed and are 40-150x more likely to consume branded content in news feed than on brand Pages. As on desktop, Brand Page posts appear prominently in the mobile news feed, just like updates from people’s friends.

Creating content that is brand-relevant, visual, and will enhance someone’s experience as they scroll through all of the stories in their news feed is essential to engaging people in news feed. For more information, check out last week’s blog post and webinar.