NeuStar claims it can boost mobile IM by 40% per year

NeuStar unveiled its new Subscriber Growth Service and Best Practice Guidelines for mobile IM - both of which are aimed at getting mobile operators to increase their mobile IM subscribers. By combining in-depth analytics with consultation and advice, NeuStar claims an operator can boost IM uptake by up to 40% every year.

NeuStar claims to have the only database of IM behavior that updates in real-time. Using this, NeuStar says it can access an operator’s subscriber base and create detailed analysis of how and when they use IM, how regularly, and with which handsets. From there, it will advice the operator on how to best increase IM subscribers through services, handsets, pricing and best practice.

From the release:

Guenter Krauss, senior vice president and general manager of NeuStar Next Generation Messaging (NGM) said: “With the Subscriber Growth Service, we can work hand-in-hand with our customers, providing a consultative, analytical service tailored to their market that will deliver long-term business benefits and allow operators the privileged, granular view of subscriber experience they need to increase uptake and profitability. We believe that we can increase an operator’s IM subscriber base and help them to generate incremental revenues from compelling next generation messaging services.”

“We have discovered, for example, that the use of mobile clients is growing more rapidly than the use of browsers to deliver IM – and in many instances, users actually prefer accessing IM via a downloadable client because it gives a better user experience. It is this type of data that we will feed back to our customers to help them develop the very best IM services, drive subscriber uptake and ultimately increase retention.”

What we think?

Now there is some genuinely useful information. Quite often these kind of releases about metrics have incredibly shallow information in them like “people like getting things for free” and “people who regularly download iPhone applications tend to be fairly well-off, sometimes”. But there is a solid nugget of info that would come in helpful to anyone looking at investing in mobile IM - people prefer using downloaded IM clients instead of web-hosted IM. And according to comScore, use of mobile IM in Western Europe grew by 83.3% during 2008 - which is a figure that any mobile operator should be paying attention to.

Also… this is the second big release we’ve seen from NeuStar today, capitalising on it’s close position with a lot of different operators around the world. NeuStar has been claiming to be the cats pyjamas for a long time now and, along with deals made earlier this year, it’s great to see them acting like it.