Social Networking Goes Mobile- MySpace tops in US, Says Nielsen

By Editor Wireless and Mobile News on May 8, 2008 1:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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.