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About Social Media Core 
Posted by Cosmin Ghiurau in 
One of the popular top trends of 2009 is according to Read/Write/Web is the Mobile Web, more specifically I want to highlight Mobile Social Networks.
According to an eMarketer report there is an estimate of 800 million mobile social network users by 2012. That is up from an estimated 147 million in 2008. This is obviously a world wide estimate.
Source: eMarketer
For the US market we see only a small percentage of 4 million mobile social network users in 2008 according to a Nielsen report. There is so much room for growth in the mobile social network market in the world not to mention the United States.
According to a recent Facebook blog post in early September 2009, Facebook Mobile is excelling in the mobile social networking space by growing to over 65 million users. That is up from 20 million in the beginning of the year. This is over 300% growth in less than a year. I myself am a dominate user of the Facebook iPhone Application which I use to access Facebook more often than the normal site as I am constantly on the go and not in front of a laptop/desktop.
Mobile Social Network Channels
One reason for the rise of Facebook as a mobile social network is its availability among multiple ways to access their social network online. Listed below are a few channels to consider for a successful mobile social network reach.
- Mobile Web Sites
- Text Messages
- Mobile Application for Devices (Apple, RIM, Symbian, Palm, Windows)
- Common ID for Mobile Web (OpenID/Facebook Connect)
This ubiquitous approach to provide all touchpoints for the social network has allowed users to be able to connect to the social network with practically any mobile way currently possible. As we can see from a recent report on AdMob and written about in Read/Write/Web requests by devices play a critical role in understanding which ones are used to access the mobile web. We can see that the iPhone has a 60% share in the US and RIM dwarfed at 13%. World wide, iPhone still maintains lead and the Nokia devices running the Symbian operating system in second place.
Source: AdMob.com / ReadWriteWeb.com
What is interesting however is the fact that Nokia (Symbian OS) has a huge lead when it comes to devices on a world wide scale. So the strategic decision needs to be made when approaching a mobile social network. What market segment should the focus be placed on. The U.S. market or to expand globally. In other words, should a focus be on Apple products or Nokia products?
Source: Admob.com / Gartner
Perhaps another question is will Apple rise to even the playing field or pass Nokia by 2012 when the expected 800 million mobile web users have access to mobile social networks? As we can see from the graph above, Nokia in 1 year has fallen in comparison with the rapid growth of Apple from 3% to 13% market share in 1 year.
As we have seen the mobile market is rapidly growing and is ripe for an opportunity for existing powerhouse social networks to condition users to the idea of using a mobile social network. The question is will existing social networks just dominate this market or will another service arise from the shadows to leverage all of the mobile social network behaviors into a successful next thing?
