Mobile is quite possibly the key battleground for Facebook as they seek to monetize the huge number of users accessing the site each day.  It emerged earlier this year that more Americans access the site via a mobile device than they do a standard computer, which coupled with news earlier this month that mobile revenues from the site are pretty poor should be cause for concern for the management at Facebook.

So new research into user behaviour when the click on an ad should be essential reading.  It found that when a user clicks on a sponsored story via their mobile device they are more likely to interact with a Page post (ie liking or commenting) than users who click on a sponsored story via their desktop.

It's not a small difference either.  The research found that mobile ad clickers made 22% more comments and left 63% more likes than their desktop peers.  Interestingly though, the desktop user was much more likely (ie 8 times more likely!!) to post a wall post of their own, click on a link or interact with multimedia.

Now it should be said that the different platforms make doing some things easier than others.  Viewing a video on your phone for instance isn't always the easiest thing and with many mobile users having relatively small data limits it does perhaps explain why they are less keen to load a web page or view a photo.  Liking and commenting by contrast is a piece of cake on your phone.

With Facebook now offering reporting on post-click engagement this is something that no marketer should really be ignorant of, but it does underline the fundamental difference between desktop and mobile users at the moment.  It will be interesting to see how this changes as tablet devices become more popular and data plans improve.