Integrating Social Media and Mobile Devices into Your Digital Signage Plan

The key to a successful digital signage strategy is to interest your viewer. If you don’t get them to look at the screens, there’s no point. Modern technologies add a new gloss to things. However, if your audience doesn’t interact with your message, then it’s not effective. Whether it’s Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or Google+, you can build community and boost participation for one or all of your social media sites by incorporating them into your digital signage plan.

The heart of today’s most successful communications is inclusion – two-way dialogues instead of just pushing messages down and out from the top. Digital signage can embrace these trends by drawing in content from social media portals and delivering messages beyond screens to smartphones, tablets, desktops and webpages.

This is especially relevant for schools and universities, since social media and smartphones are the primary channels that students use to communicate. Recent studies and surveys show that students use an average of 6.9 gadgets each throughout the school year. Topping the list are laptops and smartphones, and smartphones are being used more and more every year.

In 2013, college students spent 3.6 hours a day on their cell phones and smart phones, and 92% of students say they check and send email using a smartphone. Another common practice is “showrooming” – using their smartphone or tablet while inside a store to research products and prices.

This increase in mobile computing devices is not limited to universities. The same technologies are growing in popularity for both personal and professional communications across all types of organizations. Many people are now accustomed to receiving and interacting with information while on the move, often multi-tasking – checking email, looking at news feeds, doing the shopping, answering emails, posting pictures on social media sites, commenting on stories or posts by friends, and arranging a birthday party for later in the week, all at the same time.

So, we know people are using social media – why not play to those preferences to grab attention, making your screens another favored source for information? Digital Signage can move beyond the phone or tablet, integrating your audience into an information-rich environment that communicates what you want them to know.

In our white paper, we give you simple tips for including social media in your digital signage and sending your digital signage messages to mobile devices. We give you real-world examples and samples for:

  • Desktops
  • RSS Feeds
  • Webpages and HTML5
  • Apps
  • Text Messaging
  • QR Tags
  • SMS Voting