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,

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.