More People Using Phones for Social Networking

There's no doubt that social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter are becoming more and more popular, but the way people access these sites is changing. In January, over 10% of smartphone users accessed a social networking site with their phones; that's over 5% more than January 2009.

That means that during that month, one in three smartphone users accessed a social networking website with their mobile browsers. According to ComScore, a web metrics firm, Facebook saw a 112% increase in mobile web suers, while Twitter saw a whopping 347% increase. Because the numbers came from the users who access the websites through their mobile web browser, it did not include the almost six million users who mobile applications to access these websites.

Mark Donovan, the senior VP of mobile at ComScore, said in a statement, "Social networking remains one of the most popular and fastest-growing behaviors on both the PC-based Internet and the mobile Web. 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."

Despite the overwhelming increase in Twitter users, Facebook still reigns as the most popular social networking site. Facebook more than doubled MySpace with its 25 million mobile browser users in January. Twitter saw 4.7 million mobile web users. And not only is social networking on smartphones seeing an increase, more and more people are using smartphones to access the web in general. At the end of 2009, 17% of mobile phone users were using smartphones, vs 11% at the end of 2008.

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