Mobile traffic is a blazing hot commodity right now. Mobile users tend to click a lot and convert well, and thus EVERY company is struggling with how to grab a bigger slice of mobile traffic.

So how do you achieve this? Well, you don’t do it by producing sites that look like crap on mobile devices… or sticking with them.

And you most definitely, don’t fill page after page with plain text. Sorry, writers…

In one of the clearest case studies we’ve seen this year, more images seems to equate to more mobile traffic. What am I talking about? Instagram leapfrogged Twitter in terms mobile traffic, according to ComScore.

The August traffic numbers are in:

• Instagram – 7.3M mobile visitors
• Twitter – 6.86 M mobile visitors

If you don’t think that has something to do with Twitter’s graphic-heavy redesign, you’re crazy. It has EVERYTHING to do with it.

I’m not saying that Twitter is specifically focus on Instagram as its primary competitor. I’m saying, the traffic trends are clear — images equal mobile traffic.

Twitter’s mobile traffic is growing steadily, but Instagram’s is exploding. Twitter’s mobile traffic has grown by 24% since March, while Instagram’s has grown by a whopping 720%!

For startups and entrepreneurs, it may be as simple as creating a photo-sharing app. But what about a massive social media platform that was built on a foundation of 140-characters updates — for “desktop web” users.

The September redesign may have helped Twitter’s mobile growth, but I doubt it moved the needle more than a few percentage points — maybe double digits.

Nobody can predict the future, but it sure looks like we’re going to continue seeing mobile users flocking to design conscious sites. Ugly sites are just not cutting it anymore… not for mobile users especially.

Have any of you guys noticed how user expectations are changing? We recently split tests some mobile squeeze pages and realized how fatigued out old ones really were…