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Global researcher ExactTarget has found that Internet users across Australia are more likely to interact with brands they follow on Twitter, compared with their peers in the UK, Germany and Brazil.

According to ExactTarget’s 2013 Global Executive Summary seen by local business magazine BRW, nearly 50% of Australians with a Twitter account follows brands as they want to stay informed about the products and services they offer. Almost 40% of Aussies said they follow companies in order to get the latest news about brand developments.

Although just 6% of Australians follow brands on Twitter, these users have the potential to become a brand’s biggest advocates, so business can’t afford to ignore their influential power, commented Lee Hawksley, managing director at Exact Target Australia.

The researcher established that only consumers in France were more likely to follow a brand on Twitter in order to receive information about their latest products and services. In Brazil, about half of Twitter users follow brands in order to get discounts, while in Germany consumers do so as they want to receive alerts related to developments within the company.

Twitter account holders in the UK tend to be motivated by reasons similar to those driving Aussies to follow a brand on the micro-blogging social networking site. Some 42% of Britons follow brands to get more information concerning their personal interests and hobbies.

It also appears that Australian consumers are showing greater interest in so-called ” brand curation,” a relatively new concept gaining popularity in the UK and the US, whereby people tend to follow companies on social media that have something to do with their personal preferences rather than to get a discount or a special offer.

Children in Australia are gradually replacing consoles with apps for gaming, providing a great opportunity for marketers looking to reach the younger generation, a new report suggests.

Cartoon Network’s 10th New Generations survey shows that in just 18 months the percentage of kids using apps doubled to 69%, highlighting the increasing influence of technology fuelled by the growing adoption of tablets and smartphones in homes.

Cartoon Network studied the media habits of around 1,800 children and also established that they use an average of seven apps per month. Most often kids have their own device, but they also borrow one from their parents or siblings as 85% of households now have a tablet or a smartphone.

Currently, nearly half of Australian households have a tablet and 30% of children use the device to go online. About one in three parents said they spent over $10 on apps in the month before the survey took place.

Despite the huge increase in app usage, TV is still popular for kids’ entertainment and according to Peter Hammer, senior manager of strategic research at Turner Broadcasting System Asia-Pacific, it is still the most effective advertising channel on the market. The survey showed that three in four parents watched TV together with their kids in the past week. For six in seven of those polled, TV was the best way to find out what their children want.

Apps are transforming the way parents are entertaining their kids, a trend triggered by the surge in smart device ownership which gives children easier and faster access to the Internet and games, Hammers commented.

Nearly half of digital marketers find difficulties in adopting website personalisation due to lack of the right technology tools, new survey suggests.

Econsultancy, in collaboration with website optimisation expert Monetate, surveyed around 1,100 digital and e-commerce professionals working for brands and agencies for the purposes of its report, titled Realities of Personalisation. The researchers established that although the majority of marketers believe that personalisation is a key component of success, 47% of industry professionals face IT-related issues that prevent them from delivering a personalised visitor experiences on their web page. Some 46% of the panel mentioned legacy technology as their main obstacle to website personalisation and 44% said they did not have sufficient resources to personalise their websites.

Respondents from marketing agencies identified lack of knowledge and inability to convert data into action as the biggest barriers, cited by 54% and 51% of marketers, respectively.

Both companies and marketing agencies placed lack of budget and lack of staff as their third and fourth greatest concerns. According to Econsultancy, this implies that marketers need to do their best to prioritise resources, no matter how scant they are.

Website personalisation involves using technology to insert content that is relevant to the individual user by deploying behavioural targeting techniques to find out more about visitors’ interests and social category. It seems, however, that companies are broadly unsuccessful in gathering such insights, mainly because of the lack of a unified source from which to generate data. Some 30% of in-house marketers and 24% of agencies consider that disparate data sources hinder their efforts to use consumer insights for data personalisation.

New research conducted jointly by Nielsen and Google reveals that when consumers browse the Internet for a product via their mobile devices, over half of them usually have a clear intention to buy the item.

For the purposes of their Mobile Search Moments study, the partners asked 416 participants to log any type of mobile searches they made over a two-week period in the last quarter of 2012, which produced around 6,300 queries. The searches where then analysed to show when people used their devices to search and their follow-up actions.

One of the most interesting findings from the report is the fact that 55% of the searches that triggered an action, such as going to a store, calling a business or making a purchase, did so within one hour of the initial query. This implies that mobile is probably the most critical medium for search marketers and business owners, Econsultancy says.

The report also showed that three quarters of searches triggered further action and conversions. Some 36% of the searches led to additional research, 25% resulted in visiting a retailer’s website, 25% enticed the user to visit a physical store, 17% triggered a purchase and 7% led to a phone call. On average, mobile searches triggered a minimum of two actions, according to the research.

Contrary to popular opinion that people tend to browse the Internet via their mobile on the move when a desktop PC is not available, the study revealed that most of the searches (77%) took place at home or at work, when people were likely to have access to a PC.

Media monitoring specialist Kantar Media has found, perhaps surprisingly, that shopping via handheld devices is much more to the liking of male mobile users, Warc reports.

The researcher’s Global TGI index showed that, in both developed and emerging markets, men are more likely to use their phone to purchase products than women. The findings prove once again that technology is playing a crucial part in consumers’ buying habits and behaviours, trumping common opinion that men don’t like shopping, Kantar Media said.

In Australia, for example, the proportion of men buying products via their phones stood at 9.5% against 9.2% of women, while in the UK 12% of male mobile users said they shopped via mobile compared with 2.5% of women. Men living in the US emerged as the biggest group of m-commerce lovers, with 15.9% of survey respondents doing so against 13.3% of women. In Germany men were more than twice as likely to shop via their gadgets, as 5% of those polled said they used their phones for purchasing items versus just 1.9% of women.

Brazil and France scored similar results in the survey, where figures were 2.3% and 1.7% for the Latin American nation and 2.2% and 1.7% for the European country. Kantar found that mobile shoppers in these two markets were more inclined to make unplanned purchases. In France, 13% of mobile shoppers were likely to buy products on the spur of the moment against 6% of those using conventional shopping channels. In Brazil, 36% said they tend to make impulse purchases compared to 29% of the general population.