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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Essentially Pew found the following:

23% of adults and 28% of mobile / cell phone owners use the GPS on their phones to get directions somewhere

9% of Internet users – so essentialy one in ten – set up their Twitter, FB etc accounts to disclose their location when they post via automatic tagging

5% of all mobile / cell phone owners – but 12% of smartphone owners – check in via services such as Foursquare and Gowalla

In addition to smartphone owners, Pew also shows that younger users and non Whites are more likely to check in online.

The smartphone stat shows that services such as Foursquare do have some future, as smartphone ownership in the US (and UK) is around 35%, while most mobile phones sold now are apparently smartphones.

Indeed, Fast Company recently published a piece questioning whether Foursquare has the ‘juice’ to hit the big time.   Foursquare has somewhere North of ten million users, but to put that into perspective Instagram has over eight million, has been going for less than a year and still only runs on Apple iOS.

As a previous Foursquare sceptic, I’ve revised my opinion about them.  Because I’m a heavy Instagram user, I now check in on Foursquare every day.

The redesigned app looks good, but Fastcompany points out that the route to mass adoption is more fun, better apps connected to Foursquare, and quite simply more significant discounts and deals of the type that American Express has been running with the network.

However – it is not just about the big number.  A stat I’m fond of quoting as it shows that you need to look at who is using a network, and how they are using it as well as how many are using it – there is evidence that people who check into retail locations spend significantly more money than those that don’t.

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• 28 percent of U.S. consume mobile and location-based services (intomobile.com)
• Pew: More Than A Quarter Of U.S. Adults Use Mobile And Social Location-Based Services (techcrunch.com)

Previous results showed that TV is still far in front with the Internet a  distant second and newspapers nowhere to be seen.   But for 18-25 year olds things were somewhat different.   Mobile phones and not PCs+Internet were in second place.   TV was in front, but not by much.

The latest results have changed and an important milestone has been crossed:

TV remains the most-missed media for UK adults as a whole, although this has decreased from 50% in 2009 to 44% in 2010.   But for the first time, adults aged 16-24 mention using a mobile phone (28%) and using the internet (26%) ahead of watching television (23%).     Result – TV only campaigns are increasingly leaving consumers behind, and if you haven’t got a mobile element you are missing a lot of young adults completely.

Trust in social media increases
Another key stat: Trust in information relayed via social media and online media as a whole has increased.

34% trust what they read in newspapers, while 59% trust what they read on news websites.  Related to that, as another study showed, online articles command more attention than their print equivalents.

However at the same time, more consumers now trust rather than distrust what they see on social networks – 36% vs 33%.   That trust is most likely to be highest among women, 16-35 year olds and ‘AB’ higher earners.

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But who are these in store mobile browsers?  A US study from Oracle (via Marketing Charts) gives us the answer.  Not surprisingly given the growth in smartphone ownership it shows that more consumers are browsing and researching products while in store – up from 27% in November 2009 to 48% in December 2010.   And it’s the under 35s that are most likely to do so – 60% compared to 27% for the over 55s (actually still quite a high % for that age group.)

Overall men (51%) browse and research in-store more than women (44%).

However, according to another US study by the BabyCenter, the percentages are very different when you only look at mothers with 68% using their smartphone while shopping.    That BabyCenter study says that “moms love smartphones” with 53% having bought one as a direct result of becoming a mother.  An important point for marketers to bear in mind – even when wheeling their prams around, mothers today are increasingly connected via their mobile devices.

In fact according to eMarketer (via Techcrunch), every day Americans now spend more than 2x as long on their mobiles (50 mins) as they do reading magazines (20 mins).   Indeed, as much time is spent using mobile devices as reading newspapers (30 mins) and magazines (20 mins) combined.

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The ITU says that 1.6 billion had home Internet access by in 2010, up from 1.4 billion last year.   That figure should pass two billion over the next few months, which means that around 30% of the planet will have home Internet access.

That obviously varies by continent, from 9.6/100 in Africa to 2/3 of the population (65/100) in Europe.

In comparison though 90% of the world’s population is within reach of a mobile phone network.  By the end of the year, there should be 5.3 billion mobile subscriptions.   In other words, the majority of the world’s population now has a mobile/cell phone.

Most of that growth is in the developing world – while there are now 116 mobile phones per 100 inhabitants in the developed world, there is still room for growth in the developing world where penetration is 68%.

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Meanwhile India and Indonesia occupy the top two spots, each having seen an astonishing 3.6+ billion ads served up to its mobile user base in Q3.   To put that into perspective, India currently has 471 mobile phone users (so that’s an average of 7.5+ ads per user).   127 million are “Internet ready”, but only two million are ‘serious’ mobile Internet users.

Meanwhile Libyan mobile users saw 255 million mobile ads fired out at them – that’s for a total population of 6.2 million.

Costs and bureaucratic problems with telephone companies do mean that in emerging markets mobile phones are most often used as the telephone of choice.   To take South Africa as an example, mobile penetration is around 100%, yet land line use is at 11%….which falls to 3% when you look at the non white population of the country (comparable to regional rates of 2.6%).

But does mobile advertising in emerging markets actually work?   I am aware of some anecdotal case studies that shows it does.

For example when I spent some time on secondment with Cow Africa last year, they told me that their mobile campaigns in Nigeria were on some occasions getting an engagement rate as high as 4% – far, far higher than normal click through rates which according to AdMob can be as low as 0.1%.

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US users are far more likely to access a social network site or blog (21.3% vs 17% for Japan and 14.7% for Europe).  While on the other hand, Europeans lead when it comes to listening to music (thanks Spotify!), capturing video (a quarter of us do so apparently) and playing games.

Two stats however that show how mobile networks and usage is further along the curve in Japan.   First of all, mobile TV never really caught on in Western Europe or the US – Comscore shows that around 5% in Europe and the US either watch TV and / or video on their phones…which means this % watch video as I can’t think of anyone I know who uses their mobile as a portable television.    In Japan however the figure is one in five (22%).

Secondly, browser and application use is much higher in Japan than in Europe or the US.   In Japan, almost 6/10 use mobile browsers compared to 1/3 in the US and 1/4 in Europe.   So for Japanese users at least, the mobile handset really is on the way to becoming their primary Internet device.

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• comScore: Comparative Report on Mobile Usage in Japan, United States and Europe (technokitten.blogspot.com)
• Mobile Usage in Japan, U.S. and Europe, Compared (readwriteweb.com)

And the most popular categories?   Pretty much what you would expect: Games (60%), News and weather (52%), Maps / Navigation (51%), social networking (47%) and music (43%).

Situations where people use their apps – when alone (71%), waiting for someone (53%), while at work (47%) – bad news bosses, and while commuting (36%).   However, over a quarter (27%) also use mobile phone apps while socialising.   A case of being bored, or actually using apps such as Google Maps, to find where you and a group of friends need to go?

For the full infographic, go here.

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Top stat?  90% of 18-29 year olds take their mobiles to bed, and 70% of 30-49 year olds do so.     As that proportion of adults certainly isn’t married or even in a relationship, it shows how we’re essentially partnered up to our phones.

The second one that caught my eye was about teen texting.   The fact that younger age groups text more is well known,  but as the infographic shows, while most adults send under 10 texts a day, for teens, 29% send over 101!

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