Research company comScore has published a study that looks at social networking access via mobile web browsers. It's found that 30.8% of smartphone users in the USA accessed social networking sites via their mobile browser in January 2010, up from 22.5% year-on-year. Access to Facebook via a mobile browser has grown 112% in the past year, with Twitter experiencing a 347% jump.
In total, 11.1% of all US mobile phone users accessed a social networking site via their mobile browser, an increase of 4.6 percentage points from January 2009.
25.1 million mobile users accessed Facebook via their mobile browser in January 2010. MySpace attracted 11.4 million mobile users, while Twitter had 4.7 million mobile users in January. These figures are just calculated from mobile browsers and don't include almost 6 million mobile phone owners who access social networking exclusively through applications on their mobile phones.
Mark Donovan, comScore's senior vice president of mobile, said "Social networking remains one of the most popular and fastest-growing behaviors on both the PC-based Internet and the mobile Web. Social media is a natural sweet spot for mobile since mobile devices are at the center of how people communicate with their circle of friends, whether by phone, text, email, or, increasingly, accessing social networking sites via a mobile browser."