An Arbitron study found that United Kingdom smartphone panelists spend the most time with mobile social media. The study showed that over 85 percent of smartphone users in the U.K. spent nearly 11 hours in January on some form of networking application. The study focused on three market areas, the American, European, and Asian markets. The European and Asian markets both consisted of three countries to gather a larger sample size for the study.

Facebook (News - Alert) and Twitter were the social networking applications of choice for most of the countries involved in the study. In the American and European markets, the U.S. and U.K. dominated over France and Germany in mobile social networking application usage. Facebook and Twitter (News - Alert) being developed in the U.S. gave the numbers a jump start, as non-English versions of the sites were not developed right away. China has its own system of social networking sites that affect the numbers presented in the Asian market studied.

The study showed that smartphone users are not confined to one access point for social media outlets, with both mobile applications offered by networking sites and mobile versions of the websites themselves in the phone browsers. The American and European markets had very little differentiation between application users and mobile Web users, but the Asian market showed a high percentage of users choosing one type of access point over the other.

This number is skewed slightly by the results from the Chinese market that had nearly a 50 percent difference between the two access points. The study also showed that users who chose to access mobile applications for social media tend to spend a larger number of hours connected to the site. The numbers favor the time spent on applications two to one over mobile Web based social networking in all of the markets that participated.