Infographic via Reuters

It’s true. A few years back people could not get enough of bigger and bigger screens (TVs, Computer Monitors, etc.). But, now a mobile crazy culture has turned the tide a bit. People want devices to be quick and portable. Even with this desire for compactness, rich media is still very popular.

People love viewing photos and watching videos on phones and other mobile devices. The lack of screen space or high quality audio has not limited the desire for on-demand streaming content. So, when working on your mobile site consider this. Yes, text loads faster and people are often hunting down specific info on the mobile web. But, do not be afraid to jazz things up a bit.

Adding Rich Media to Your Mobile Site

YouTube Videos

YouTube is very mobile friendly, working across almost all platforms (thanks Google). Squareberry’s mobile management area offers a few ways to include YouTube videos. First, there is the YouTube video page type, which allows you to provide a URL to a YouTube video and it will be formatted and fit right onto your mobile site. Additionally, you can embed a YouTube video anywhere you are adding custom content (Home Page, Info Pages, or a Custom Content Page).

Photo Galleries

The Photo Gallery page type is a great way to provide visual content for your site viewers. You can upload and arrange any number of photos. You can add multiple galleries and optimize to your liking. Your galleries are optimized for mobile devices and offer thumbnail views as well as full screen versions of your images.

Graphics, Banners, Icons and More

Your menu can be customized with icons for each page to give your site even more pizzazz. You can also add a banner image to your header and customize your background. All of this enhances your mobile site visually to make is more appealing and striking. It is important to feed the visual appetite of mobile device users to get them engaged as soon as they reach your mobile website.

So what’s the deal with the Sidebar? It somehow works like Quora in a way where search results can be commented by your Facebook contacts who want to share their insights about the query. The great thing about Bing’s Sidebar is that it gives you results from Facebook conversations regarding your query. If you’re about to order at a restaurant, it’s a good thing to have a suggestion from a friend or two before deciding what to choose from the menu. The Sidebar is all about relevance and real-time results. Arguably, it’s a genius idea for users who simply go online to check Facebook out.

While Google is the king of searches, I recently experimented with the idea of searching Avengers art on Pinterest and Google, surprisingly, Pinterest gave me the freshly-baked, and real-time content whereas Google simply showed the usual results. This only shows that the Sidebar could be the game-changer for Facebook and Bing, the essence of social search is how you can give users the search results in real-time. It’s really a matter of freshness, when people go online they check two things first: either to check their email or log in on their Facebook accounts, the latter is more true because some people don’t really have email accounts or don’t really bother checking it out.

At this point, social search has yet to be developed just as mobile websites is still a pain for most marketers. While Google is still the old reliable when it comes to search marketing, its recent attempts at social like Google+ has yet to overwhelm Facebook and users feel that Google’s search results are erratic due to the Pandas and Penguins. For Facebook, the quest for Internet supremacy is still beyond their grasp. I wrote in a previous blog post that every social network needs a search engine to back them up. In a study by PageLever, it showed that  34% of all external referrals are from search engines. Google lead all engines with 27.57% of all external traffic that leads to Facebook pages. Google sends more than 10 times the traffic than Bing which partnered with Facebook to enhance their social search conquest.

Image via ComicArtCommunity

Bing has a long ways to go as a social search engine, the same goes for Google+ to go toe-to-toe with Facebook. In this age of social business, it’s all about the branding+functionality. But there lies the conflict, the average user know that Google is just a search engine, Facebook a social network, and Bing the other search engine…The good thing about what Bing is doing is that it’s building its own brand without a nameplate that says “The Facebook Search Engine”, on the other hand, Google wants to Coke-ify itself across the Web. Every new product they have they tend to put “Google” in it. It’s ridiculous. It’s redundant. It’s a case where function tramples branding.

But will Bing overwhelm Google soon? Not by a longshot, Facebook is still another website on the Web. Google is still the largest search engine (though it can’t get social right). The next big war on the Internet is about functionality not branding.