In 2016 more people are connecting to the Internet from their mobile devices than desktops. With this trend increasing more and more businesses are rushing to create and publish mobile-friendly content.
Latest estimates show that there are four mobile devices for every laptop or computer. Also, people always carry their mobile devices with them wherever they are unlike laptops or desktops. The mobile trend has given rise to information snacking where people are consuming content via their mobile phones in their spare time and people want bite-sized information as quickly as possible.
Mobile users are known to abandon their attempts to visit any website if it takes more than a few seconds to load and often do not return to websites that gave them a buggy user experience the first time. Companies and content marketers must start creating mobile-friendly content to be published on mobile-friendly websites so that they do not lose out on a large customer base.
Content that is compatible with desktop devices does not cut it anymore as people cannot view it or engage with it from their mobile devices. Creating responsive or mobile-friendly websites is essential and they must be filled with content that is mobile-friendly too.
Creating great mobile content is not rocket science and here are seven tips that will help you create such content.
1. Reduce the number of images
Content marketers know that visual content is the most appealing. However, adding large images and replacing textual content with pictures is great on websites meant to be viewed only from desktop devices and not if you want to build great mobile content.
Infographics, images, graphs, etc. are extremely large files that take a long time to load on mobile devices as these devices have limited bandwidths.
Also, large images mean that the person viewing your website has to scroll a lot to view the images in their entirety. A website with many large images is hard to view and navigate via small mobile devices and can frustrate mobile users.
2. Reduce size of images
Mobile screens do not offer the same resolution as desktop devices and such mobile devices will resize large, high-resolution images to fit small mobile screens. This can negatively impact the quality of the images.
Make it a point not to include too many large images or high resolution images with your content and stick to textual content as much as possible.
3. Eliminate flash components
Flash animation, video and navigation content are absolutely incompatible with mobile devices. Flash is used to create rich media content and they work fine on desktop devices but on mobile devices they can ruin the user’s experience with the online content.
Another reason to stop creating and publishing flash-based content is the fact that Apple has stopped flash compatibility on all its mobile devices and Google has also followed suit by removing Flash from its Android operating system.
4. Keep textual content short and simple
Mobile devices offer only a few square inches in area to view content. This makes it very hard for mobile users to view long textual content and most users lose patience when they have to navigate and scroll too many times to view content on any website.
To create excellent mobile content, make sure that the content is succinct and short so that mobile users do not have to scroll too much to get all the information. Highlight important points and make sure that the font is big enough so that users can read the content without having to zoom in.
5. Break up textual content
Readers looking for online content have no patience to go through long textual content and this is even harder to do on mobile screens.
Make sure to break up your content into small, easy-to-digest paragraphs and do not tackle too many points in one paragraph. Use bullet points, numbered lists, informative subheads and highlighted text to get the most important points across to mobile users reading your content from mobile devices. Also, using these bullet points and numbered lists also reduces the amount of text needed to describe something and less text always increases the mobile-friendliness of the content. Hire a good copywriter to create short, punchy mobile content.
6. Include mobile plug-ins
There are many plug-ins on the Internet that allow people to create mobile-friendly content by allowing users to engage more easily with content from their mobile devices.
One of the most widely used plug-ins is WPTouch that is perfect for creating mobile content that needs to be published on WordPress. It makes content more mobile-friendly by removing large design components and allows the content creator to customize the content for mobile visitors. Although content customized via WPTouch may not be very visually appealing, it is compatible with all mobile platforms.
7. Make video content more mobile-friendly
Video content is one of the most popular forms of content that is being published as it allows companies to create more personal relationships with customers and readers. However as mentioned before, Flash is a complete no-no for creating mobile content. Mobile video content consumption has risen exponentially so you should ensure that all your videos can be viewed easily on small mobile screens. With Custom CSS and HTML 5, videos can be made to resize automatically to fit any mobile device screen.