I recently stumbled upon a Nielsen report covering mobile social networking use and what caught my attention, was how well this report grasped the story of where new media is headed!

According to Nielsen, 4 million US mobile customers use their devices to access social networks, each month – this represents 1.6% of all mobile users in that country. This number alone truly doesn’t paint the picture of wide spread mobile usage for social networking activity, until you compare it to what is happening in Europe.

Nielsen reported that in the UK, the leading EU country using mobile devices for social networking, 812,000 people used their device each month to access social networks. The UK adoption rate for mobile social networking came in at 1.7% of all of its mobile users.

Now for the startling parallel. In Europe, where owning and using a mobile device for everything is second to breathing, their leading country for mobile social networking has an adoption rate that surpasses the US by only 0.1%. So, although the US mobile market has been slow to respond in many areas, when compared to other parts of the world, mobile social networking seems to be the balancing draw.

As publishers contemplate taking their content mobile, considering how they could build social networking parallels within their products, as well as directory services, is not a bad idea at all.

written by Beverly Crandon \\ tags: Directories, Mobile, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Directories, Mobile Social Networking, Social Networking