There has been plenty of talk about the growth of social, mobile, and cloud trends as of late, but a new study focuses on how the former two are driving growth for each other.
ComScore’s MobiLens service has reported that 72.2 million Americans accessed social networking sites or blogs on their mobile device in August 2011 — an increase of 37 percent in the past year.
While this might be great for mobile manufacturers seeing that consumers will likely want more, well-powered smartphones (and tablets as well over the next few years) to make use of these apps and services, the real beneficiaries are definitely the social media sites and networks themselves.
For example, comScore found that Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn each saw mobile audience growth of at least 50 percent in the last year. Here’s how those figures breakdown for the month of August 2011:
- Facebook: 57 million mobile users, up 50 percent from 2010
- Twitter: 13.4 million mobile users, up 75 percent
- LinkedIn: 5.5 million mobile users, up 69 percent
For reference, the numbers are based on responses of U.S. survey participants aged 13 and over, and it covers both smartphone and non-smartphone users.
But as discussed at the Web 2.0 Summit this week, it’s one thing to collect all of this social and mobile data, but it’s another to figure out how it’s going to benefit one’s business.
Mark Donovan, comScore’s senior vice president for mobile, explained in the report:
Advertisers and marketers should take note – mobile users are not only engaging with their friends through social networking, but a majority are also interacting with brands in these social media environments. Knowing that fans and followers engage with branded content on mobile devices opens the door to a world of opportunity for location-based services.
So far, there’s already some solid footing for mobile advertisers to get involved here. Mobile users accessing social networks were found to be more likely to interact with brands on those sites than not, and 52.9 percent said they read posts from organizations/brands/events. Additionally, one in three in this group said they received some kind of coupon/offer/deal, with one in four clicking on an ad while conducting mobile social networking.
Related:
- iPad driving massive growth for iOS in enterprise (survey)
- U.S. mobile users becoming ‘digital omnivores’ (survey)
- Samsung leads as top mobile manufacturer in U.S. (report)
- Facebook is destroying Google in time spent online (chart)
- The new Social Business Index seeks to bring enterprise insight to social media
