Will social networking drive mobile data usage?

摘要

Online social networking is growing in popularity in Europe, yet the factors driving this phenomenon are still not clearly understood. Our data shows that while texting is still the primary mobile data communication activity in most every market around the world, accessing mobile community sites and communicating in this alternative way is growing much faster in the three European countries profiled in this study than more traditional means of communications, like sending emails via cell phones.rnIn the United States however, emailing happens to be almost as popular as SMS and the use of mobile social networking is not much higher than in less developed mobile data markets, like Hungary. Although Facebook is the most used community site in Europe, there are very popular local social networking sites as well, which may contribute to the fact that Europeans seem to be more engaged than Americans in more specialized social communities - some local and some international.