Social networking may be considered a colossal waste of time by some, but for the mobile industry, it’s a Godsend, with new research indicating the mobile Internet may be just as reliant on social networks as it is on the mobile data network itself.
A study carried out by mobile research outfit, Ground Truth, says social networking comprises over half the time people wibble away on their mobile Internet connection.
Unsurprisingly, Ground Truth also found users of mobile-specific social networks to be wildly more self-obsessed, er, sorry, “engaged” than those who socially not-worked from their PCs.
Polling 3.05 million U.S. mobile subscribers, Ground Truth also uncovered the rather surprising ‘truth’ that Facebook and MySpace were not the main attention grabbing social sites on the mobile platform, with more mobile-centric social networking sites like MocoSpace and AirG taking up much more of users’ time and engagement.
The firm said it managed to measure this using its “patent-pending, census-based methodology” offering, True View.
Ground Truth’s vice president of marketing, Evan Neufeld, said the data meant advertisers needed to sit up and pay more attention to a “whole universe of media properties,” he says “have to date been largely ignored.”
“Traditional media companies that are not focused on the Mobile Internet—both browser- and application-based usage—risk losing market share to leaner, more mobile focused companies,” he added.
Neufeld noted this was the first time researchers had been able to “truly quantify just how much the category [of social networking] is driving adoption of the mobile internet with actual usage metrics.
“The disparity of time spent between social networking and the next category, portals, which account for 59.83 and13.65 percent of time spent respectively, is a vivid illustration of the impact social networking has on Mobile Internet traffic in a given week,” he concluded.
