With more audience on mobile, adaptive content is key

It’s not enough to take a story written for a desktop or tablet and put it into mobile, according Amy Gahran’s article “Mobile content strategy: It’s really about being adaptive.”

Society has steadily been moving toward mobile in recent years, which has changed how readers are obtaining their information. Instead of waking up and pawing through the newspaper at breakfast, individuals are often scrolling through Twitter or Facebook on their phone.

Journalists are now faced with the task of designing content that fits the medium in which readers want their information from. Pew Research Center published information in June 2012 that stated 31% of Americans who use their cell phone to surf the web said it is how they mostly always go online.

In order to suit this changing model, Karen McGrane wrote a book entitled, “Content Strategy for Mobile,” to help website owners better construct their content for this new audience.

While it may seem like these users scrolling through the Internet on their phone are less engaged than users on a desktop or tablet, McGrane refutes this idea with data from Readability. She says that the average time for mobile readers is longer than the other two mediums.

With that said, McGrane still says that improvements should be made in order to provide audiences with the best content for mobiles. Instead of writing a story specifically for mobile and another specifically for desktop, she recommends creating content that is adaptive.

If this is done successfully, the content will flow across all platforms with subtle changes in each to better benefit the reader. McGrane says that the content created should be structured so it can be combined multiple ways depending on what platform that audience is viewing it on.

Additionally, it is “presentation-independent,” meaning it wasn’t styled for one format. This is contrary to how some view the change of mobile journalism, believing that the content for mobile should be in a specific format with mobile in mind.

In order to do this, McGrane suggests following a process called content modeling. The four steps include: content types, attributes, data limits and relationships.

By going through and identifying these different aspects, McGrane believes a publisher can make their content adaptive, which is the ultimate goal.

Perhaps the most telling line in Gahran’s article came at the end when she writes, “we're not even calling it a ‘mobile strategy’ anymore -- and that's the point.” While it is important to consider how all content will appear on mobile — a screen vastly smaller than a tablet or desktop — the goal should be able to make content seamlessly transition from one platform to the next.

It’s not an easy task. If it were, it wouldn’t be such a hot-button topic of discussion. Still, strides have been made in the are, and if one considers how to make content adaptive and reusable, more can be made in the future.

The research shows that audiences are moving mobile, and if companies want to keep readers loyal, they need to consider that.