Social Networking Sites Attracting Mobile Browsers

According to the latest comScore report, 30.8% of smartphone users accessed social networking sites via their mobile browser in January 2010, up 8.3 points from 22.5% one year ago. Access to Facebook via mobile browser grew 112% in the past year, while Twitter experienced a 347% jump.

Mark Donovan, comScore senior vice president of mobile, said "Social networking remains one of the... fastest-growing behaviors on both the PC-based Internet and the mobile Web... "

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 8%age points on the year. By comparison, just 6.8% of feature phone users accessed social networking sites on their mobile phones.

Mobile Browser Access to Social Networking (3-month average ending Jan. 2010 vs. Jan. 2009 Total U.S. Age 13+)
	% of Subscribers Accessing
Mobile Browser	Jan-09	Jan-10	Point Change
All Mobile Phones	6.5%	11.1%	4.6
Smartphone	22.5%	30.8%	8.3
Feature Phone	4.5%	6.8%	2.3
Source: comScore MobiLens, March 2010

In January 2010, 25.1 million mobile users accessed Facebook via their mobile browser, up 112% from the previous year. MySpace attracted approximately half that of Facebook in January. Facebook's mobile browser audience surpassed MySpace in February 2009.

Twitter, which has experienced tremendous growth in both mobile and PC-based visitation, attracted 4.7 million mobile users in January, up 347% versus year ago. 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.

Number of Mobile Subscribers Accessing Social Sites via Mobile Browser (3-month average ending Jan. 2010 vs. Jan. 2009 Total U.S. Age 13+)
	Total Audience (000)
Social Network Site	Jan-09	Jan-10	% Change
Facebook.com	11,874	25,137	112
MySpace.com	12,338	11,439	-7
Twitter.com	1,051	4,700	347
Source: comScore MobiLens, March 2010

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