A growing number of mobile phone subscribers
worldwide are taking online social networking to the streets, research
conducted by The Nielsen Company reveals. The U.S. has the most mobile social networkers totalling 4,079,000.
The
findings, released by Nielsen Mobile, a service of The Nielsen Company,
show that the U.K. leads Europe in mobile social networking on a
percentage basis -- with the U.S. boasting comparable numbers.
Leading PC Social Networking Sites are Also Tops Over Phones
In the U.S., MySpace.com, the leading social networking site among PC
users is also the most popular mobile Internet social networking site.
The site logged 2.8 million unique mobile users in December 2007.
Also
in December, Facebook, which has the second largest audience among
social networking sites, had 1.8 million unique mobile users.
In
contrast, Facebook led mobile social networking sites in the U.K. with
557,000 unique mobile users per month in Q1 2008, while MySpace
followed with 211,000 unique mobile users.
While Facebook and
MySpace.com were also among the top social networking sites in other
European countries during the first quarter of 2008, MSN's Windows Live
Spaces led in Italy (154,000 unique mobile users per month) and France
(106,000), and ranked second in Germany (45,000) behind MySpace, which
boasted 52,000 unique mobile users per month.
In
the U.K., approximately 810,000 mobile subscribers, or 1.7 percent of
all mobile subscribers in the country, visited social networking
websites on their mobile phones in the first quarter of 2008. That
reach percentage was twice as high as it was in other major European
markets--though similar to the U.S., where 1.6 percent of all mobile
subscribers (4.1 million in all) accessed social networks via their
phones in December 2007. For more details on mobile social networking
access by country, see the chart below.
| Mobile Social Networking Reach - US and Europe | ||
| % of mobile subscribers who access social networks over the mobile Internet |
Number of mobile subscribers who access social networks per month, over their phone |
|
| United States | 1.6% | 4,079,000 |
| United Kingdom | 1.7% | 812,000 |
| Italy | 0.6% | 293,000 |
| Spain | 0.8% | 291,000 |
| France | 0.6% | 255,000 |
| Germany | 0.2% | 141,000 |
Source: Nielsen Mobile; EU data Q1 2008, US data December 2007.
"Social
networking is already a global phenomenon, and going mobile is the next
big thing," said Jeff Herrmann, vice president of Mobile Media at
Nielsen Mobile. "In the U.K and the U.S. especially, we already see
millions of users of MySpace.com, Facebook and other social networks
interacting with their virtual spaces while they're on the go. Consumer
demand for mobile social networking may be a significant driver of
mobile service pricing models as evidenced by Vodafone UK's recent move
to offer unlimited Internet access as a standard feature of its new
monthly mobile price plans."
Nielsen's Mobile Internet
Reports are available today in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the U.K
and the U.S. The reports provide detailed audience measurement metrics
for mobile Internet and offer insights on how mobile users are
interacting with social networking and other mobile Internet content.