Going mobile, one small step at a time

Earlier in the year I wrote a post on Mobile browser trends into 2010, where I looked at how traffic from mobile devices had be steadily rising from around a thousand visits per month in April 2009, to seven thousand visits per month in April 2010.

I hadn't been paying too much attention to these figures lately, but I was quite shocked to see that mobile traffic had rocketed up to twenty thousand visits per month. Perhaps a bigger shock was that this increase had been much less gradual than over the previous year. Growth had remained steady until September this year, but then the start of the new academic year saw a doubling of visits - hello to our new intake of smartphone-carrying students.

Smartphone traffic to york.ac.uk, 24 December 2009 to 24 December 2010. The huge leap is the start of the new academic year

So will 2011 be the year that we start to make some headway into the mobile world? Hopefully we can make some time alongside the other projects that we've committed to for next year.

Making our blog mobile-friendly

How the blog now appears on an iPhone

My actual reason for writing this post, before I got distracted by looking at graphs, was to say that this blog now has a mobile enabled template, so should be much easier to read on a smaller screen.

(Aside - if you're a blogger user, this is really simple to enable for your own blog. See New mobile templates for reading on the go - Blogger in draft.)

While we may not have a mobile version of the university website for the twenty thousand people who look at it each month on their mobile, the small band of followers of this blog can now enjoy a better mobile reading experience.

Merry Christmas everybody!

Accidentally building an audience on Facebook

It's almost exactly three years since I set up the University's Facebook Page, as part of the landgrab when 'Pages' were first introduced. Since then we've done very little with the page other than keeping it ticking over. I've kept a slow trickle of updates flowing into our stream, usually press releases or public lecture listings, but very little else.

Given the lack of effort expended, it's been to a bit of a surprise to realise of late that our Facebook Page has become rather popular. We're approaching 6000 'likes'. We've almost trebled our number of 'likes' in 12 months, with a big spike when A-level results came out but continuing to grow at 50 - 80 new ones per week (see images below). This is especially impressive given that we've never posted a link on the homepage or main student pages of the website.





Our levels of interaction are relatively low; we get tiny numbers of 'likes' or comments on most posts and almost no questions on our wall, though we do very little to encourage any. But last night when I posted an update about our presence on University Challenge we picked up half a dozen comments and 45+ 'likes' within the hour. We also know that we get a small spike in traffic to stories on the website or videos on YouTube when we post them on Facebook. In short, it's clear that there's an audience out there and that it's comprised of people who, having sought us out, are interested in what we have to say (especially when we say something interesting!)

The ambition of Facebook's expansion - the changes to Messages announced yesterday, the Foursquare-style checkins, the open graph Facebook-isation of the whole Web and persistent rumours about ventures into search and mobile - mean users may well soon be spending even more time in Facebook. For the forseeable future we'll be continuing with our light touch approach, but as Facebook grows and our audience on Facebook grows too, we may find that we've accidentally grown a valuable communications channel deserving of much more attention.

Related info: For anyone wondering if their department or office should be on Facebook (or Twitter, or LinkedIn etc.), we're producing some guidelines to help you decide and to help you do it well if you do take the plunge. These aren't quite ready yet, but they're coming (better late than never!) In the meantime, feel free to contact us for individual help and advice.

Where does all the bandwith go?

Another graph-based post - stop me if you're getting bored of them!

Arthur from the Computing Service recently blogged about how the University's connection to the outside world gets used:
 

Here black is the overall, purple is streaming protocols and green is “standard” protocols (including http, email etc). A lot of people are watching a lot of videos and/or playing flash games.
(BTW If you’re wondering how academics ever get to do any work, most of that video is actually going to the student study bedroom network rather than the main campus network)

Some quick stats on the Uni’s external link 

Mobile browser trends into 2010

Who doesn't love a good graph?

Following on from Dan's post about Browser Trends into 2010, I though it would be interesting to look at all smartphone traffic to the site over the last year.

A year ago we had just over a thousand visits per month from iPhones, Androids, Blackberrys, etc. We're now up to almost seven thousand. Still small numbers in the grand scheme of things, but a huge increase percentage wise.

For anyone who's interested, this graph was created using an advanced segment in Google Analytics, configured to include traffic with a browser or operating system that matched the regular expression:

android|black|HTC|iphone|ipod|lg|nokia|
palm|samsung|sonysymbian|vodafone|treo|xda|netfront