Access to Facebook via mobile browser grew 112% in the past year, while mobile Twitter access experienced a 347% jump, according to a new study from comScore.
Mobile Users Favor Facebook and Twitter over MySpace
In January 2010, 25.1 million mobile users accessed Facebook via their mobile browser, up 112% from 11.8 million mobile users in January 2009. While only 4.7 million mobile users accessed Twitter from their mobile browser in January 2010, this represented 347% growth from 1.05 million mobile users in January 2009.
Meanwhile, mobile usage of MySpace dropped in the past year. In January 2010, 11.4 million mobile users accessed MySpace, a 7% decline from 12.3 million mobile users in January 2009.
Facebook’s mobile browser audience surpassed MySpace in February 2009, three months earlier than the Facebook audience exceeded that of MySpace on the PC-based internet in May 2009. These figures do not include access of the social networking services by the nearly 6 million mobile phone owners who do so exclusively through mobile applications.
Mobile Social Networking Grows
In general, the popularity of mobile social networking is increasing. In January 2010, 11.1% of all mobile phone users accessed a social networking site via mobile browser, an increase of 4.6 percentage points from the previous year. Much of this growth has been driven by smartphone owners, 30.8% of whom accessed social networking sites on their mobile browsers, up more than eight percentage points on the year. By comparison, just 6.8% of feature phone users accessed social networking sites on their mobile phones.
Women, Middle-aged Do Most Social Networking
Women and people between 35 and 54 are most apt to perform social networking activities via mobile device, according to data from The Nielsen Company. A clear gender gap exists in social networking activity on mobile devices. In December 2009, Nielsen research indicates that women were responsible for 55% of mobile social networking activity, compared to 45% performed by men.
Kids Don’t Lead Mobile Social Networking Usage
Despite the stereotype of teens spending every waking moment on a mobile device, Nielsen data suggests their parents actually spend more time performing mobile web surfing. Only 7% of mobile social networking activity was represented by 13-to-17-year-olds and only 16% by 18-to-24-year-olds in December 2009.
The leaders in mobile social networking activity are 35-to-54-year-olds, who accounted for 36% of mobile social network usage in December 2009. Close behind them were 25-to-34-year-olds, who performed 34% of the month’s mobile social networking activity. Users ages 55 and up combined for the remaining 7%.
Comments
Interesting stats Mike. This exponential growth just looks set to continue, especially with more and more phone apps being developed.
There should be a huge explosion of mobile use over the next few years as the younger generation start to move into the Twitter & Facebook space. We’ll see a lot more tweets & facebook updates from mobile devices as they start to realise that SMS is expensive, restrictive & old school.