There’s good reason tweets are limited to 140 characters – the microblogging social network was developed specifically with mobile in mind and 140 characters is the size limit for a text message. With that in mind, it’s no surprise that Twitter has experienced a 347% jump since a year ago in people accessing the site via mobile browser.
According to a comScore report, both Twitter and Facebook have experienced significant increases in mobile browser access over the past year.
“Social networking remains one of the most popular and fastest-growing behaviors on both the PC-based Internet and the mobile Web,” said Mark Donovan, comScore senior vice president of mobile, in the company’s press release. “Social media is a natural sweet spot for mobile.”
Just over 30% of smartphone users access social networking sites using a mobile browser, comScore reports, up from 22% just a year ago. Access to Facebook using a mobile browser grew 112% while Twitter grew a whopping 347%.
What do these numbers mean in terms of actual number of visitors? According to comScore, Facebook saw 25.1 million mobile users in January 2010, Myspace had 11.4 million and Twitter 4.7 million. As the report points out, “these figures do not include access of the social networking services by the nearly 6 million mobile phone owners who do so exclusively through mobile applications.”
As smartphones continue to grow in popularity, social networking services will get more and more traffic from mobile use, and we wouldn’t be surprised to see mobile access overtake other methods of access at some point in the future.
