Mobile was one of the 'top trends for 2010' that I talked about on this blog, there's been a flurry of special reports on it lately in the marketing press, and last week was the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, which, according to NMA had 47,000 attendees.

Just about every other page in the marketing magazines seems to feature an image of the iPhone. We're told there are more than 120,000 apps already for the iPhone (or 140,000, depending on what you read).

So is a mobile app something to consider in a social media marketing mix? Do small businesses need to be thinking about it seriously?

According to Kim Benjamin in Revolution magazine, 'if you're not looking at mobile apps now, you'd better start soon.' A new report from tech consultancy Gartner claims that the consumer apps market is set to rocket, driven by the 'increasing popularity of smartphones'. The report also suggests that advertising revenue from mobile apps will increase more than threefold between 2010 and 2013.

And yet Marketing magazine recently looked into the mobile apps frenzy and came up with some sobering facts. A whopping 76% of UK mobile phone users claim not to even own a phone with internet service, let alone downloading apps. Apple has a 99.4% share of the apps market, yet there are only 1.5 million iPhones in use in the UK. The average half-life of an app (the time before half its users abandon it) is nine days. Even the much-hyped 'augmented reality' social apps such as Foursquare are still very new in the UK and probably unknown outside of the geek-tech market.

The apps market is crowded and competitive - the advice from Andrew Walmsley in Marketing is to approach the idea with the same strategic planning you would the rest of your marketing. Is the proposed app going to offer some identifiable benefit to the user? Has it been done before? How will you promote it, and why would anyone download it or share it?

My own feeling is that within a social marketing mix the idea of a mobile app may have a place - depending on who you're looking to reach with it and given that you have good answers to the above questions. Apps are potential social content.

But for the majority of small businesses operating outside the media/tech sector it's very niche. And, despite recent announcements that mobile media metrics are set to improve, difficult to measure in terms of its marketing effectiveness.

In other words, I wouldn't advise jumping in just yet.

www.eggboxmarketing.co.uk