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July 31, 2008
Report: Online Social Networkers Use More Media Content
By Raju Shanbhag, TMCnet Contributor
Saying subscribers who participate in online social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, and Bebo are much heavier users of digital content than the average mobile phone service subscribers, ABI Research (News - Alert) today released two surveys.
With the advent of social networking Web sites such as MySpace, Facebook (News - Alert), and Bebo, digital content has been on the rise on the internet.
The report sys that increased SMS usage among the Social Network Mobile Subscribers is not likely to be the result of a desire to interact with social networks. Instead, it says that Social Network Mobile Subscribers have an increased comfort with data services and are being – by the very nature of their involvement with social networks – more actively communicative and "social."
ABI conducted these two surveys online in November, 2007. The surveys sampled just over 1,000 mobile subscribers and just over 500 online social network mobile subscribers respectively. Three-quarters of the latter group were aged between 18 and 30. This group is twice as likely to own a smartphone as their non-networked equivalents. Smartphones afford users the ability to type alphabetic characters directly into the device, greatly facilitating communication via email, SMS, MMS, and IM. Logically, owners of such devices would be power users of messaging services.
“The fact that online social networkers consume more mobile content and media than mobile subscribers who aren’t into online networking may not be really surprising,” said an ABI principal analyst, Nick Holland. “However, what we have long suspected is now confirmed by the numbers: for most kinds of mobile content, online social networkers consume about twice as much as their non-networked peers. Advertising on social networks isn’t working particularly well, so promotion of mobile content on online social network sites should be a high priority for mobile operators, content distributors, media companies, and advertisers.”
Raju Shanbhag is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Raju’s articles, please visit his columnist page.
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