Creating Consumable Content For Mobile Users

Mobile users and desktop users are two completely different beasts. A desktop user likes to take their time reading content, usually at home at a desk or on the couch.

A mobile user likes to surf Facebook, while playing Angry Birds as they are shopping in a mall while simultaneously reading reviews of your store. Needless to say, the mobile user loves to multitask and creating content to keep them engaged is no easy task.

Most have a much shorter attention span due to all the notifications they receive, making ‘traditional’ content that we once used to target desktops less effective.

How to create content for mobile devices?

1. Show them shiny things
By shiny things, I mean images and lots of them.

Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest have all become so popular because mainly due to images. 63% of all social media consists of images and 66% of updates on social media contain some sort of visual content:

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(Source)

Include as many images as you can when targeting mobile users as they keep their attention much better than text.

2. Use less text
Headlines shown to mobile users should be short and sweet. Most screen sizes will be anywhere from 3-5″ and your goal should be to write headlines that don’t require them to swipe or zoom to read.

Paragraphs should also be shorter, with a maximum of 3 sentences per paragraph (a bit like this article). Mobile users are prime for distraction and if they see several long-winded paragraphs ahead of them, they will shy away.

Split your paragraphs up with lots of pictures, if you don’t have pictures to show then find random cat images online to break things up:

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Only joking, use the most appropriate pictures you can.

Make your content shorter

Posting long-form content is great for SEO, building authority, increasing your reach and a 101 other things, but it’s not great to keep the attention of mobile users. They will much rather prefer shorter content that can be consumed easily and quickly.

If you only produce long-form content then consider running a podcast as they are consumed by mobile users a lot more and allows them to do other things while listening.

Bullet points

Have some points to summarize? Then use bullet points to save time and space, benefits include:

⦁ Breaks up paragraphs
⦁ Easier to skim read
⦁ Acts as a stop point for users to stop scrolling and take notice
⦁ Allows you to breakdown a topic without being too long winded

Most landing pages uses bullet points because they engage users a lot more than paragraphs.

Summary

If you receive a lot of mobile traffic, consider creating a few bespoke pieces of content which you will only show to mobile devices.

Perhaps you have landing pages that are rather long and appeal to only desktop users, consider creating a V.2 of your landing page which uses the following tips above and serve it to your mobile audience.

Use this article as a template, it contains all of the features I’ve listed above and would be a breeze to read on a mobile or tablet device.

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Nick Bridges

Nick is an Award Winning web designer, is also the Creative Director for the Agency, assisting in areas like funnel creation, copywriting, Landing Page development, and more. Nick also oversees all of the technical components of the creation and implementation of Social Media Ad Genius.

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About The Author

Nick Bridges

Nick is an Award Winning web designer, is also the Creative Director for the Agency, assisting in areas like funnel creation, copywriting, Landing Page development, and more. Nick also oversees all of the technical components of the creation and implementation of Social Media Ad Genius.

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