Mobiles to get more social?

A recent report from the Nielsen Mobile branch of the research group Nielsen indicates that a little over 10% of mobile phone users in the UK have used their handsets to access social networking websites in the past month.

To put the figures into context, of an approximate total figure of 48 million mobile phone subscribers in the United Kingdom, 21 million belong to a social networking website. These sites include Facebook, Bebo and MySpace. A quarter of these users with social networking website profiles, or around 5 million, have used their mobile phones to access these online profiles.

Why not? With an increased amount of mobile phone deals to access the internet from mobile handsets and the somewhat addictive nature of updating one’s Facebook status, this figure is hardly surprising.

557,000 Facebook users admitted to updating their profiles via their mobiles in the month prior to the survey, with MySpace following in popularity with a figure 211,000 mobile user updates. Bebo, Windows Live Spaces and Flixster came respectively third, fourth and fifth in the mobile phone deal stats for social networkers. Other popular sites included Friends Reunited, Where Are You Now? and Yahoo Groups.

In terms of the features that mobile phone offers social networkers, the majority of UK survey respondents indicated that their favoured activity was messaging or mailing friends with a social network profile. Reading messages or mail, viewing photos, uploading images and adding friends were also regarded as popular mobile pastimes.

The survey was based on interviews conducted with a sample group of 10,000 mobile phone users in the UK. According to Nielsen Mobile client services manager, Kent Ferguson, these results indicate that the mobile phone could be the next big thing in terms of social networking. Watch this space?

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