Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Whether it’s to message to a friend, check the weather before leaving the house, scroll through Facebook on the bus to work, or upload a picture of that fantastic salad you made for lunch; we interact with our phones at many points over the course of the day. In fact, according to KPCB’s ‘Internet Trends Report’, we interact with our phones an astonishing 150 times a day.

At first glance, this number seems ludicrously high, but when Google’s research team paired this with another statistic from comScore that we spend a total of 177 minutes on our phone a day, they came to a believable conclusion: when we interact with our mobile, we only do so on average for a mere 1 minute and 10 seconds. These high intent, engaging bursts of digital activity in which we interact with our phone, are what Google has coined ‘micro-moments’.

So why do micro-moments matter to social media? To begin with, it’s important to understand how consumers are engaging with social media platforms; 79% now access social media through their phone, so any insight into consumer’s phone behaviour is relevant. More directly, micro-moments matter because they highlight some realities of social media for the vast majority of consumers, as well as some interesting repercussions:...

In what some observers are equating to the next evolution of marketing's "moment of truth," Google has come up with a new term, "micro-moments," to define how the omni-presence of mobile devices is redefining the consumer's journey.

In a new report, "Micro-Moments: Your Guide to Winning the Shift to Mobile," Google pointed to findings showing that over two-thirds of smartphone users check their phones within 15 minutes of waking up in the morning and that 87% always have their smartphone at their side — even while they sleep — as evidence of how mobile devices are "transforming our lives, whether we actively notice it or not."...

What used to be our predictable, daily sessions online have been replaced by many fragmented interactions that now occur instantaneously. There are hundreds of these moments every day—checking the time, texting a spouse, chatting with friends on social media.

But then there are the other moments—the I want-to-know moments, I want-to-go moments, I want-to-do moments, and I want-to-buy moments—that really matter. We call these "micro-moments," and they're game changers for both consumers and brands.

Micro-moments occur when people reflexively turn to a device—increasingly a smartphone—to act on a need to learn something, do something, discover something, watch something, or buy something. They are intent-rich moments when decisions are made and preferences shaped. In these moments, consumers' expectations are higher than ever. The powerful computers we carry in our pockets have trained us to expect brands to immediately deliver exactly what we are looking for when we are looking. We want things right, and we want things right away....