Facebook and Twitter Access Grows Exponentially Over Last Year, Says comScore

According to a comScore study social networking access via mobile
browsers is growing. The study found that 30.8 percent of smartphone users accessed
social networking sites via their mobile browser in January 2010, up
8.3 points from 22.5 percent one year ago. Access to Facebook via
mobile browser grew 112 percent in the past year, while Twitter
experienced a 347-percent jump.

In
January 2010, 11.1 percent 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 percent of whom accessed social networking
sites on their mobile browsers, up more than 8 percentage points on the
year. By comparison, just 6.8 percent of feature phone users accessed
social networking sites on their mobile phones.

"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."

Mobile Browser Access of Facebook and Twitter Posts Triple-Digit Growth

Access
of leading social networking sites via mobile browser continues to see
significant growth. In January 2010, 25.1 million mobile users accessed
Facebook via their mobile browser, up 112 percent from the previous
year. MySpace attracted 11.4 million users, approximately half that of
Facebook, in January. Interestingly, 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. Twitter, which has experienced tremendous growth in both
mobile and PC-based visitation, attracted 4.7 million mobile users in
January, up 347 percent 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.