The other week  I wrote a post with a run-down of stats, about why brands need to be ‘mobile first’ rather than ‘digital first’.  Following that stats came out showing that in the US, mobile users spent longer on Facebook than PC users.

Now data about mobile social networking in Europe has appeared from Comscore.  While the social media audience on PCs grew 8% to 171 million in the major EU states (UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain) over the past year, the mobile audience grew 43% to 66.9 million.

Yes, that means the PC audience for social media is still 2.5x larger than the mobile audience, but the trend is only one way.   Moreover, if you look at individual social networks, the picture is different.  Twitter’s mobile audience grew 101% and LinkedIn’s 96%.

At the IAB UK Mobile Engage conference last week, Twitter actually stated that 80% of its UK user base now accessed the network via their phones.

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A piece of research from the Brookings Institution (thanks @kenyanpundit for the link) finds that, at least in politics, when it comes to gee-ing up supporters, online video works best.  However, if you are going to trash someone, stick with TV.

Though all eyes are currently on the US Presidential election, the Brookings Institution carried out its study in 12 countries worldwide.

The Brookings Institution found that anyone likely to watch a political video on YouTube was younger, richer, more educated, more likely to be interested in politics – and more partisan.   In other words, you don’t trawl the world’s largest online video site to help inform your point of view.  You look through it to find political content that already confirms it.

The other factor, is that you can run political ads on YouTube for free, meaning lengthy missives to supporters that would cost you a fair amount of money on TV have a home there.

TV is different.  You are more likely to find wavering voters, and ones less interested in politics on telly.  And it costs money, so you need to make it count.  As a result, though 22% of YouTube ads involved a character attack on an opponent, for TV that figure jumped to 38%

The Internet – an organisational tool

Both in the US and UK there has been a certain amount of “see, I told you so!” type reactions to findings that TV not the Internet informs public opinion when it comes to politics  

In fact, the Brookings Institution findings point to a fundamental misunderstanding of what the Internet is good for in political campaigns:

“The internet is not mainly a tool for politicians to communicate directly with voters, even though voters are free to peruse campaign websites if they wish. Instead..the internet serves as a tool for campaigns to inform other members of the broad political elite, including journalists, commentators, activists, and opinion leaders.”

More to the point, it serves as a place where you can recruit volunteers, raise cash, and disseminate campaign material.   Your campaign website or Twitter account will by and large not change minds.  The TV debates still serve that purpose.

Men more engaged with online video

At the same time, a separate Comscore study in the UK shows that unlike the social media arena as a whole, online video is an area dominated by men.  Men are far more engaged with both content videos, as well as ad videos.

Top image – boutmuet

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• Report: YouTube Campaign Videos More Positive than TV Ads (techdailydose.nationaljournal.com)
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Last week Comscore released a major report around the mobile Internet, Mobile Future in Focus.  A lot of that has already been covered by the major social media sites, so because I didn’t get my act together in putting my post up soon enough, I’ve summarised ten key findings from the report.

Essentially they show that across all markets, but in the UK in particular, mobile devices are now the norm and not the exception when it comes to consumers going online, something that should be front of mind for all marketers.

It shows that more affluent 25-44 year olds are typical smartphone owners and it shows that mobile devices are becoming an essential shopping companion when shoppers are in bricks and mortars stores.

1 – A majority of American (55.2%) and British (56.6%) mobile phone users now use mobile media, defined as browsing the web, downloading content or accessing apps.   Note however how far ahead Japan is, with three quarters accessing mobile online media.

2 – In fact, the UK (as well as Spain) has now passed the smartphone tipping point, with over half (51%) of mobile owners being smartphone users.    As long ago as May 2010, smartphone sales passed feature phone sales (as opposed to ownership) in the UK

3 – The UK is also ahead when it comes to web traffic from mobile devices (9.5%), compared to the US (8.2%), Australia (7.7%) and Japan (7.1%).  The latter figure suggests that though Japanese mobile phone users are more likely to go online in absolute terms (see stat one), UK mobile users access the web more heavily

Note that these figures account for all web traffic, including people sitting at work.   I’d guess you’d arrive at higher figures if you looked at people accessing the Internet outside of the workplace

4 – Certain media channels in particular are getting a lot of their traffic from mobile devices.  Comscore tells us that in December 17% of movie visitors reached the BBC through a combination of app and browser usage

5 – The top selling devices in both the US and the EU5 are the iPhone4 and the iPhone3GS (the iPhone4S is no three in the US and no 5 in the EU5)

Of course overall Android has a higher share of smartphones than Apple iPhones (31% vs 21% in Europe).   However, as I’ve posted previously if you are looking at handset sales you are looking at the wrong thing, you need to look at user behaviour, and previous research has shown that 61% of European mobile web traffic comes from Apple devices

6 – One reason for that could be that the ubiquity of Android phones means that if you walk into your local phones4u and ask for a “phone” you will be steered towards one of the many lower end Android devices.   Indeed, the cost of the monthly service was the second most important factor among European smartphone purchasers, behind network quality.

7 – In the EU5, most smartphone owners are still male (55.7% vs 44.3% – in the US it is a more even 51/49).   There has been evidence in the past to show that Android phones have more of a male bias than iPhones

8 – If you are running a mobile marketing campaign, don’t make the mistake of assuming your audience is all teens.  In both the US and EU5, smartphone ownership is heaviest among the 25-44 year old audience possibly due to the price of buying a handset and possibly due to the fact that a lot of workplaces  offer smartphones as their company phone

9 – A lot of attention in 2011 went on the mobile photo network Instagram (now arguably the largest mobile only social network in the world), and for a lot of US and European consumers the mobile is now their primary camera   In the States 74% and in the EU5 84% took photos with their phone.

The % who sent emails (31%) and accessed social media (26%) via their mobiles in Europe is lower, but I’d imagine significant variations if broken down country by country.  However it is worth noting that in absolute numbers, 25.5 million Europeans access a blog or social network via their smartphones every day

10 – Though it bases this statement largely on US figures, Comscore tells us that smartphones are “poised to become consumers’ favourite shopping companion in 2012.”   One in five U.S. smartphone owners took a picture of a product while in store and nearly the same number texted or called family or friends about a specific product.

Women in particular were more likely to make shopping a ‘social’ experience, with 24% taking pictures, while men were more likely to use their phones for information gathering, such as scanning a barcode or comparing prices.

Finally Comscore has a stat about mobile phone owners who scanned QR codes – in the US it was 20.3% and in the UK 12.3%.  Of course, that stat doesn’t tell us anything about their experience when they scanned it (or indeed, whether they scanned successfully)

Related articles

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• Smartphones Become the Go-To Tool for Shoppers (entrepreneur.com)

‘Study shows that only 27% of Twitter users tweeted during a three month period‘ says a story in The Next Web.

My reading of the same piece is very different.   Once you put that stat into its proper context, it is not a case of *only* 1/4 using their accounts.  Rather, this shows that Twitter user engagement is on the increase.

For example, in 2010 RJ Metrics worked out that Twitter’s churn was actually in the region of 83%.   And in April I estimated that, based on Business Insider stats, of the 175 million accounts, there were perhaps 20 million truly active human beings on Twitter.

My guess is that 1/4+ engagement is something neither Google+ or Foursquare would be able to demonstrate.

Semiocast, the company behind the study cited in The Next Web says that of the 383 million Twitter accounts 28.1% were in the US.   This confirms previous research showing that Twitter has become less US focused.   Semiocast previously showed that the fastest growing language on Twitter is Arabic, with 60% of tweets not being in English.

Semiocast also confirms an earlier Comscore study which held up the Netherlands as the top Twitter country when measured as the % of the overall Internet population using it.   Semiocast says that the Netherlands had the Twitter users (33% of all Internet users), followed by Japan (30%)

Image – Laughing Squid

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Here’s a chart that neatly shows how social media is driving a sizeable chunk of traffic towards news sites.

According to Comscore  at least 10% of visits to the top European newspaper websites are preceded by a visit to Facebook.

Previous stats have shown that Turkey in particular is a core Facebook territory, and so it’s no surprise that Facebook accounted for almost a fifth of visits to Milliyet.

However, in the UK both the Guardian and Mail, the UK’s (and two of the world’s) biggest online newspapers, had around 13% of traffic coming from the social media giant.  Significantly the Guardian saw the traffic it was getting from Facebook more than double from 4.6% in November 2010 to 12.8% in November 2011.

Overall, Comscore says that 50% of European Internet users visit online newspapers.

At the end of last year, the UK’s telecoms and media regulator Ofcom found that 51% of 18-24 year olds and 37% of 25-34 year olds use social channels for breaking news.

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The other month we produced an infographic at Rabbit about the growth of in-store mobile browsing – in particular the finding that 25% of online conversations about shopping happen in shops.

Comscore has now come out with another – possibly even more impactful – statistic, showing that (in the US) 1/3 of smartphone purchases were made inside a retailer.   In other words, people walk into a store, see an item and rather than taking it to the till, they buy it there and then online.

What does that mean for retailers?   Obviously if you are, say, a book seller such as Waterstones in the UK or Barnes and Noble in the US, you don’t really want people looking at books on the shelf and then ordering via their amazon smartphone app.

It could however be turned into an opportunity as well.

In the UK, £25 billion+ a year is spent on in-store point of sale material.  Rather than that money going on ‘buy one, get one free’ type offers, some of it could be used in building interactive displays.

Want to find out what other people are saying about this product?  Go online to our mobile site, or scan this QR code.   Is the queue at the till too long?   Order it here and we’ll deliver it to your house the next day.

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More than half of UK mobile users that access social networks from their phones do so almost every day.   This is according to Comscore, which says that overall around 35% of the UK mobile phone population uses social networks from their phones.

Note that around 44% of UK mobile users have a smartphone, with iPhone users most likely to go online.   The overlap between smartphone and mobile social network users won’t be exact, but it will be pretty strong.

As a result, the conclusion is that smartphone ownership is increasing mobile social network use.   And that use is by and large heavy, rather than infrequent.

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Just as my last post about Android, Apple iOS and the US mobile Internet went live, some fresh stats came through from Comscore.

While the IBM study in my previous post refers to the US, Comscore’s latest smartphone figures are about the EU5 – UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy.

Comscore shows that the iOS platform – and Comscore includes iPod Touches as well as iPhones and iPads – accounts for 30.5% of mobile devices in the major European markets.    This compares to 29% for Symbian (Nokia) and 24% for Android.

IBM’s research in the US shows that Apple iOS users are more active online in both relative and absolute terms.   In Europe, Comscore shows that this is even more the case.

61.1% of non-PC browser based page views – so the vast majority - are made from Apple mobile devices, compared to 20.9% from Android devices.   Meanwhile, despite clinging onto the no.2 spot in smartphone popularity, Symbian phones account for only 2.7% of European mobile Internet traffic.

Again, Comscore’s European stats mirror IBM’s American ones in showing the disproportionate influence iPad users have on the mobile Internet.

iPads currently account for 43% of all iOS traffic.   To put that in perspective, in April, Apple revealed that 10% of iOS devices were iPads.

The European Comscore and US IBM figures, raise the question of whether we are looking at smartphone market share in the right way.  Currently there seems to be a train of thought among marketers that Android is where it is at, because more are being shipped.

Yes, brands need to factor in both the Android and Apple iOS universes, but as the Symbian figures show, having lots of handsets on the market and having those users go online with their devices is not the same thing.

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Not everyone is a fan of the Daily Mail (myself included), but the online version of the UK tabloid continues to establish itself as one of the biggest Internet news brands worldwide.

According to Comscore, in March 2011 the Mail and Guardian online were level pegging at 40-41 million odd visitors.      However by August, the Guardian was in distant second place with the Mail attracting an amazing 85 million visitors / month compared to the Guardian’s 53 million.

It is worth mentioning that the major UK newspaper brands now get a large share of their web traffic from outside the country.    As far back as 2009, Comscore showed that between 48%-73% of  UK newspaper site visitors were from outside the UK and I’d imagine that % will have increased by now.

A point to bear in mind if you are a UK PR getting coverage in the online edition of a UK newspaper – most of those X million eyeballs you quote your client in the coverage report are from outside the country.   Of course, that could be a positive depending who the client is.

Back in March, The Guardian said that the Mail was the second most popular English language news site after the New York Times.   It will be interesting to see if the Mail now has the no.1 spot, especially post the NYT’s (partial) pay wall.

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Five years ago if you wanted a phone with a few bells and whistles you would most likely go for a Nokia or (Sony) Ericcsson – they were plentiful, ubiquitous and with a variety of models to suit different budgets.    Now it seems the same reasoning drives people towards Android.

Comscore’s latest look at the European smartphone market is out.   It shows that Symbian lost the same % of users that Android gained (16%).  Android is now second to Symbian in the European smartphone market with Apple iPhones 3rd (37.8% vs 22.3% vs 20.3%).

Android ahead of Apple?  Depends how you measure it

However, though ‘Android beats iPhone’ makes for a good headline, the truth is less black and white.  As Comscore shows, in pure smartphone ownership, there are now more Android users.    But the Apple iOS ‘universe’ also includes the iPad, dominant in the tablet space, and iPod touch.

Indeed over a third of Apple iOS devices are apparently iPods, with iPod Touch owners being more active users of the app store than iPhone users – something worth bearing in mind when thinking about the popularity and reach of services like the photo-sharing network Instagram.

Back in April, the Apple’s European user base was double that of Android’s.   That gap will have shrunk, but I would still bet that there are more Apple than Android devices in the EU5.

A final point to note is the % of smartphone users as a % of the total in the UK (44.5%).   Indeed, in the last quarter for the first time more smartphones than feature phones were shipped in Europe.    Out of the five major EU states surveyed, the UK also leads in mobile social network use, with a third of UK mobile users having accessed social media from their phones.

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• Comscore: Android’s UK market share explodes as Apple overtakes Symbian (engadget.com)
• Is Symbian going down or Android rising? (binaryimmersion.wordpress.com)