14 DAY TRIAL // The usage of social networking sites from mobile phones is one the rise, a recent report from comScore, Inc. shows. According to the company, 30.8 percent of smartphone users accessed social networking sites via their handsets' browsers in January 2010, a number that is 8.3 points higher when compared to the 22.5 percent users registered one year ago. Moreover, the company also notes that the access to Facebook via mobile browsers went up by 112 percent during the past year, while the usage of Twitter registered a growth of 347 percent.
“Social networking remains one of the most popular and fastest-growing behaviors on both the PC-based Internet and the mobile Web,” said Mark Donovan, comScore senior vice president of mobile. “Social media is a natural sweet spot for mobile since mobile devices are at the center of how people communicate with their circle of friends, whether by phone, text, email, or, increasingly, accessing social networking sites via a mobile browser.”
The report from comScore further shows that 11.1 percent of all mobile phone owners accessed social networking sites from their handsets in January 2010, marking an increase of 4.6 percentage points when compared to the previous year. Smartphone owners are those who accounted the most for the increase, with the 30.8 percent of them accessing social networking sites, while only 6.8 percent of feature phone users made the same move.
comScore also notes that the access of leading social networking sites from mobile phones has registered impressive growth too. Facebook was accessed by 25.1 million mobile users via their browser in January 2010, while MySpace attracted 11.4 million users in the time frame. Twitter has seen impressive growth both on mobile phones and on the desktop, with 4.7 million mobile users accessing it in January this year, without taking into consideration the 6 million handset owners who accessed it via mobile applications alone. Additional details on the report are available on comScore's website.