Frequent mobile social networking grows 67% in a year in key European markets

New figures from ComScore show that online social networking via mobile devices is growing rapidly, with a 44% increase year-on-year across five key markets in Europe.

The stats from September 2011, for the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, show a 44% year-on-year increase in people accessing a social networking site or blog from a mobile device at least once a month, but more frequent use is growing even more quickly. There is a 67% increase in ‘almost daily’ mobile access to social media. Most of this growth came from increased use of apps. Accessing social services via apps saw a 101% rise, while access via a mobile browser was only up 31%.

As for specific services, Twitter and LinkedIn have seen the greatest increase, both more than doubling their mobile audiences. Twitter rose by 115% while LinkedIn jumped 134%. Facebook’s growth was a more modest 54%, roughly on par with Spain’s Tuenti, which was up by 56%.

What kinds of social content are people in these five countries accessing? Of the actions ComScore surveyed, the most common was reading posts from people known personally, at 73.6%. Only 41.6% had read posts by public figures and celebrities. Given the fact that businesses and social networks alike want users to interact with brands, the finding that only 44.3% of people had read posts from organizations, brands and events will perhaps be sobering, and demonstrate room for growth,

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For all the growth demonstrated in ComScore’s figures, it’s worth noting that text messaging is still way ahead of all Internet-related mobile activities. 82.9% users surveyed had sent a text message, while only 34.5% had used an app they installed themselves and just 23.5% had accessed a social networking site or blog.

So, plenty of growth and clearly room for much more.