Move over print media, television and internet news. The hand held social media powered by smartphones is fast overtaking any other form of media communication. Google search by mobile users is growing at an astonishing pace of 30% year on year.
The Twitter # hash tag search is becoming the most popular mode of logging into current events happening across the world. A US baseball event, a football match in the English Premium League or cricket extravaganza in the Indian Premium League could attract a million plus tweets within a few hours.
A disruption of the civic services, an airline accident, a grisly crime could be rage on twitter for days while a juicy political or sex scandal and an oil spill story could be primetime headline grabbers for months. Twitter links are the initiators of global communication and people go after  the real story only if the tweet looks worthwhile and relevant.
The digital media growth over the last few years has become explosive with the mobile users multiplying double digit year on year. They today comprise of the fastest growing segment in the social media. According to a recent report of Nielsen and NM Incite mobile phone users spend 13.3% of their time in texting and 5.5% of time on social networking applications.
Over 35.7 % of US mobile users accessed the social media through the hand held device in the period ending Jan 2012 up from 25.2% in the previous quarter. If the US smartphone usage to tap social has been phenomenal the rise of mobile phone users engaging in social media through the hand held device in Asia has been unprecedented.
With nearly 700million mobile users in India growing at a phenomenal pace of 250,000 new users per day the mobile usage of social media is fast and furious. Facebook has over 38 million subscribers from India, 40% of who log in from their phones. Linked In says India is the second largest market globally and 20% to30% of users log in through the hand held device. Twitter with 14 million Indian users report half its log in through mobile devices from Indian users. The trend is found to be similar in Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Korea and China with mobile users growing at a much faster pace than the desk top segment. As a matter of fact social through mobile will soon outstrip the growth in other segments making it easy to relay news photos, films and chatter virally across nations.
I love to write on anything and everything under the sun from Project Management to Poetry, Economics to Travel and Technology. But most of all I love to write about our planet earth, about which you can read more in my blog Ecology to Economics. You may also meet me at http://www.twitter.com/ecothrust
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Tags: App downloads, Mobile Social, Text messaging
