If You’re Smart, You’re Social!

comScore, Inc. released its MobiLens report today on trends in the US mobile phone industry. Surprising almost no one who has been paying attention, accessing social media sites or blogs grew at more than 3% for the period October 2009 through January 2010 over the previous three months, making it the number one growth activity, ahead of “used browser”, “played games”, or “listened to music”. That’s nearly 8 million people Facebooking, Tweeting and blogging without being tethered to a computer. And the number is growing rapidly.

For brands that may still be on the fence about the need or desirability to have a social media strategy, the jury is in. This is particularly true for certain brands and business types.

To paraphrase Jeff Foxworthy, if your brand/product/service…

appeals to early technology adaptors
relies on word of mouth referrals
provokes an immediate emotional response or opinion from its consumers
prompts shoppers to seek advice and referrals from friends
has a limited marketing budget
wants to engage with customers in addition to creating transactions
has a need for immediate customer feedback

… you just might need a social media strategy.

Share (%) of Smartphone Subscribers, Jan-10

There are 42.7 million people in the U.S. using smartphones. That’s 18.25% of total mobile phones in the U.S., and that number grew by 18% from just the previous three months. You might ask what percentage of smartphone users actually uses their cell phone for social media. The answer? Nearly all of them; 94%.

Other key findings:

234 million American (ages 13+) were mobile subscribers
Motorola was the top handset manufacturer (22.9%)
RIM (Blackberry) was the top smartphone platform (43.0%, or 18.36 million)
Apple ranked #2in smartphone platforms (25.1%, or 10.7 million)
Microsoft was the only platform to decline in share (down 4.0%)
Google had the biggest growth among smartphone platforms (+4.3%)

Additional information and the complete report can be found here.

This was posted by Steve Calkins on Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 and is filed under Blog, Interactive Team Blog, Media Team Blog, Misc, Social Media, Strategy Team Blog, it contains the following tags .

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