Facebook growth further signals it’s all about mobile for law firm publishing

The New York Times’ Vindu Goel (@vindugoel) reports this afternoon that Facebook, on news of strong mobile growth, blew away Wall Street’s expectations sending the stock up 20% in after-hours trading.

We’ve made good progress growing our community, deepening engagement and delivering strong financial results, especially on mobile. The work we’ve done to make mobile the best Facebook experience is showing good results and provides us with a solid foundation for the future.(emphasis added)

And from Goel:

The company’s results show that its users are continuing to shift toward mobile phones and tablets to access the site instead of a computer’s Web browser. Although the company’s total number of active monthly users worldwide grew slightly from the first quarter to 1.15 billion, the number of people who use its mobile versions at least once a month grew 9 percent to 819 million in that time. (emphasis added)

41 percent of Facebook’s revenue now comes from mobile, up from 30 percent in the first quarter. 819 million of the 1.15 billion Facebook users now use its mobile versions at least once a month, up 9% in the last month.

What does this mean for law firms, and all publishers, for that matter? Publish and develop for mobile. I’d argue you could even forget about desktop and laptop machines and still be successful. Sure do the desktop, but only as the after thought.

Think about not only what your published materials look like on mobile as presented in your app and html presentations (likely responsive design), but also how your materials will be experienced by users on Flipboard, Zite, and mobile RSS readers. When developing demand that your development team have experience with mobile UX (user experience), mobile design, and mobile development. Are they experienced in mobile publishing?

In addition it’s not just the publishing piece when it comes to development, it’s also the sharing component. Your content moves more among influencers and amplifiers by it being shared across social networks than by your users viewing it directly. Can your developers deliver on this front? Do they know and regularly use social. Ideally, you’d want them to rely on social to grow professionally as a team and also from a business development standpoint.

As a law firm professional, especially if you are in the marketing, IT, information management, or business development areas, you need to be all over mobile. You need to live and breathe mobile. You need to be consuming and sharing socially on your iPad and the multiple apps available for it. If you’re clicking around a lap top and monitor to consume content with your old iPad one (unable to use new apps) at your side, you’re arguably shirking your duty to the firm to do a good job.

Mobile is not a cool thing anymore that you look at after the fact.  Mobile is first. Desktop publishing is in second and moving further behind.