According to comScore, the number of mobile users in the United States ages 13 and up who accessed a social networking or blog website has grown a whopping 37% in the past year.
What's more: nearly 50% of these users are social networking on a daily basis using their mobile devices.
Leading the charge is Facebook, which now has a mobile audience in the U.S. fast-approaching 60m monthly. The mobile audiences of Twitter and LinkedIn aren't nearly as big, but they grew at a faster clip that Facebook in the past year to 13.4m and 5.5m, respectively.
So what are consumers doing when they're accessing social sites from their mobiles? As to be expected, they're primarily consuming content.
The three-month average of those consumers reading posts from people they know was just over 58m. But mobile social networkers aren't just watchers. A sizable portion -- over 50m a month -- used their mobile devices to produce content as well (eg. post a status update or photo), highlighting the fact that these users are quite engaged.
That engagement is potentially good news for marketers. That's because comScore found that this engagement extended to interactions involving brands and organizations. Nearly 38m mobile users are reading social posts from brands and organizations each month, 24m are retrieving coupons or deals, and nearly 20m are clicking on ads.
The key takeaway for marketers: your social strategy is part of your mobile strategy, and your mobile strategy is part of your social strategy.
Status updates and coupons distributed through Facebook and Twitter may reach users on the web, but they are increasingly going to be reaching users on their mobile devices. To ensure that you're getting the most from these interactions, you need to ensure that your messaging and calls to action work as well in the mobile context as they do in the web context.
