Dan Neary, Vice President Asia Pacific at Facebook, pointed out at his keynote speech in Web in Travel Japan 2016 that disruption, which is that technological evolution overturns traditional businesses’ orders or ideas, happens not only in the travel industry but also in any other industries, and the most influential technology is mobile.
Neary stressed that what happens today is not transition to mobile but mobile itself. The ratio of travel bookings on mobile in Asia has already reached 30% of the total, and the growth rate was 65%. On Facebook, 90% or more of 1.6 billion users use mobile, and active SIMs all over the world reach 7.5 billion, more than world population of 7.3 billion.
Neary said of what mobile indictaes, “We no longer take traditional marketing approaches and use desktop concept, and the search function using cookie dose not work anymore.”
Spending times with desktop webs and mobile webs have not changed at all in the last two years, while spending time with mobile apps increased by 90%. The number of apps used by a user a month, however, is only 27 out of 3.1 million apps (GooglePlay), and spending time with top three apps accounted for 80% of the total. “Search between apps dose not function,” Neary said.
Also, the cross-devices trend is progressing, as Neary explained that 60% of all mobile users own two mobile devices, and 25% three mobile devices. A family owns 7.5 mobile devices on average. The ratio of users who use mobile devices in a different manner is 41% of the total.
“The important action under the circumstance is to grasp individual ID that can trace users’ behaviors,” Neary said. “Facebook has a strength to connect people with real IDs, which is epoch-making in the anonymity internet world. By identifying demography and acquiring customer date, we can invest resources to the fields users spend times.”
Neary also emphasized how important visualization is, pointing out that visual on screen is changing from pictures to videos. Video viewers on Facebook reached 8 billion a day, and shares of videos tripled. Facebook purchased VR headset developer Oculus, and Neary said that VR will be a big platform.
Travel-relevant postings reach 40% of the total, which is the largest theme. 70% of users tend to change status when they move from one place to another, and 52% post what they discover there. Stressing that Facebook has strong affinity for travel, Neary said that Facebook can be useful in all travel processes from planning and booking to sharing of on-site experiences and even post-travel.
In Japanese
