Mobile social media use leaps

The number of people accessing social media sites from mobile phones has jumped massively in the last year.

Tuesday, 16 March 2010

Research conducted by comScore, a digital marketing intelligence provider, showed access of Facebook from mobile handsets had more than doubled in 2009, while Twitter saw a 347 per cent leap.

Mark Donovan, senior vice president of mobile at comScore, sees the figures as a logical development in light of the congruence of the technologies.

"Social media is a natural sweet spot for mobile since mobile devices are at the centre of how people communicate with their circle of friends, whether by phone, text, email, or, increasingly, accessing social networking sites via a mobile browser," he said.

This research reflects the increasing prevalence of mobile internet use across the board and could also signal a move away from more conventional methods of IT communications among consumers.

Speaking at University College Dublin, John Herlihy, head of global advertising operations at Google, argued such a case in suggesting that desktops will be obsolete by 2013.

"In thee years time, desktops will be irrelevant," he said. "In Japan, most research today is done on smartphones, not PCs."

Herlihy's comments echo sentiments expressed by Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google, at the Mobile World Congress in February, where the company was showing off its Android mobile operating system.

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