As more and more software developers get into the mobile development scene, you can expect and even greater rise of mobile consumption. This is noteworthy for businesses in South Africa.

Facebook, the (new) social craze among a whopping 605 000 South Africans, have opened up their platform to mobile developers.

The repercussions of these are pretty simple: More users will have access to Facebook more often. When companies thought it clever to ban Facebook from the workplace, I bet the last thing they had on their minds was that Facebookers would just crank it up a notch and find new ways to engage their users and increase the social activities through mobile phones.

One of our local talents has taken it on himself to develop a platform on Facebook which allows users to see which of their friends are active on Mxit. (Mxit of course is the uber popular mobile instant messaging platform with a recorded 5.4 million active South African users)

That’s a whole lotta mobile for a great deal of people.

Facebook of course is also in negotiations with Microsoft and Google for financing an international “SocialAds” rollout which would again revolutionize advertising as we know it.

The only conclusion we can gather from this is that consumers will be able to spend more time away from the confinement of desktop computing, or the bulkiness of their notebooks (who would have thought we’d ever use bulk and notebook in the same sentence), but still be able to have access to a wealth of information and social activity through their mobile phones.

Many businesses would question the relevance of Facebook to there businesses which is a discussion for another day and another blog.

Keeping in mind that Vodacom has launched mobile advertising, it seems though that leading businesses have caught onto this trend and are looking to enter this market as quickly as possible.

Not only have they done that, they are also in development phase for a new social media platform, the Grid, which is supposedly a mashup of Facebook, Myspace and Mxit.

This is some serious mobile and serious social networking for a seriously large portion of our population.

Consumers lead the way in the social trends, people. This is very important. Too many businesses feel they have the power and are able to channel consumer behaviour according to their guidelines.

Maybe it is time to do some introspection into your business, put yourself in the shoes of your clients / customers and establish whether you wouldn’t perhaps see the value of converging your service offering with mobile.

If you know your clientele is mobile oriented, shouldn’t you be spending more time getting to know the options mobile marketing presents?