Monday, 12 September 2011

Mobile social networking continues to captivate U.S. consumers, with 37 percent of all social media users nationwide now accessing social platforms via mobile device according to a new consumer survey conducted by Nielsen.

Click here to see more charts from the study.

Forty-seven percent of respondents have social networking features on their phones, Nielsen reports, and 30 percent say those features are among the mobile bells and whistles they value most. Only GPS access ranked higher in terms of consumer value, cited by 56 percent of respondents.

Social networking app usage is up 30 percent over the third quarter of 2010, Nielsen indicates. Sixty percent of smartphone users access social networking apps, behind only Games (67 percent) and Weather (65 percent). Facebook is now the most popular mobile app across all operating systems, while Twitter ranks fifth in overall usage on both Research In Motion's (NASDAQ:RIMM) BlackBerry and Microsoft's (NASDAQ:MSFT) Windows Phone.

Nielsen adds that mobile web access to social networking sites is up 62 percent over the last year. Facebook boasts a unique mobile web audience surpassing 46 million, followed by Twitter (11 million), LinkedIn (6 million), MySpace (4 million) and Photobucket (2 million). Users over age 55 are increasingly active on mobile social networking sites, with traffic increasing 109 percent over the last year, more than any other demographic group.

For more:
- read this Nielsen report