90% of Facebook’s regular users access it on mobile

Publishing on a non-mobile blog? You may want to think again.

The Next Web’s Napier Lopez (@napilopez) reported yesterday that 90% of Facebook’s daily active users access it via mobile.

Facebook just released financial results for Q4 of 2015, and one number starts out in particular: 934 million mobile daily active users (DAUs).

Sure, 0.9 billion might not sound quite as impressive as the 1.04 billion total daily users, but we already knew the company had passed the billion milestone in early November.

There were 894 million mobile DAUs at the time, which means the company has added 40 million more mobile users per day since November, and it will very likely cross 1 billion mobile DAUs sometime this year.

Facebook users are not only sharing personal pictures and stories, but are also sharing news stories and information. Some of these stories are published directly as an update on Facebook. Other stories are published on third party sites/blogs and shared with a link — a link that opens the third party site/blog in the Facebook interface.

What does this mean for you as a blogger? That you must be publishing to a mobile enabled interface, preferably a responsive design. Otherwise your content cannot be viewed by a good portion of your target audience – that’s those reading content on mobile devices.

I am not suggesting that your audience is all coming via Facebook. I am suggesting that Facebook’s mobile numbers signal where people are accessing social networks and content though. It’s on mobile devices.

I recently shared that LinkedIn’s updated mobile app caused a huge jump in referral traffic to news sites and blogs. The reason being that so many people were consuming news and information on LinkedIn via mobile devices.

It’s a mobile world today. You may be publishing your blog from a computer, but your blog is being consumed on mobile devices.

You should take no comfort in web stats which may indicate you have more viewers coming from non-mobile devices. Good content moves via social media even more than via search today. Content moves on social media via mobile. If your blog is not mobile optimized ala responsive, your blog is not going to move well via social media.

Facebook is almost an Internet in and of itself. It’s shaping our behavior as well as signaling what’s to come. Here it’s signaling mobile first when it comes to publishing.

Image courtesy of Flickr by F.D. Richards