Research company comScore has published details of mobile social media usage across France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom; the ‘EU5’. The information, which comes from comScore’s MobiLens service, shows that the number of people accessing social networks on mobile devices in the EU5 region grew by 44% in the last year.

In September 2011, 55.1 million mobile users in the EU5 accessed social networking sites or blogs on their mobile device; that’s 23.5% of mobile phone users. Nearly half (46.8%) of these people said they accessed social networking sites on a daily basis. Most mobile users said they did their social networking via a mobile browser (31.3 million), with 24.2 million using mobile apps.

Facebook usage was up 54% year-on-year to 39 million mobile users (71% of the EU5 mobile social networking audience) in September 2011. Twitter usage was up 115% to almost 8.6 million mobile users, while use of LinkedIn was up 134% to 2.2 million users.

Jeremy Copp, comScore Europe vice president for Mobile, said “Over the past year we have seen social networking use grow rapidly among mobile users across Europe, driven largely by the growth in smartphone adoption, making it easier than ever for users to stay connected and engage in social activities while on-the-go. More notably, the rate of growth in daily social networking usage has surpassed even the rate of growth in total social networking adoption among mobile users, suggesting that the behavior is becoming even more ingrained into people’s daily mobile lives. As social networks continue to invest in improving the user experience on mobile devices and tablets, it will be interesting to see how social behaviours on the mobile platform further evolve.”

Usage in the UK was the highest of all five countries; 35.1% of mobile phone users in the UK said they’d accessed a social networking site or blog from their phone.