Love in Motion: Why are Mobile Social Networks Booming?

An article by Ayelet Noff    3 Comments

Last December at the LeWeb conference in Paris I sat in on an interesting panel discussion entitled Love in Motion: Why are Mobile Social Networks Booming?  The panelists, Antonio Vince Staybol of itsmy.com, Dr. KF Lai of BuzzCity and Ewan Spence of WuBud, talked about what mobile social networks are, who uses them and what they use them for, how mobile social networks are monetized as well as where they are going in the future. 

Did you know that there are 4 billion mobile phones in the world?  There are only 1 billion Internet users and 1 billion television sets so, as you can see, mobile is a huge force.  In fact,in many parts of the world mobile phones are the only screens and mobile is the only way for people to get on the Internet.  That’s where mobile social networks come in.

Users of mobile social networks are different from regular social network users because, for many of them, mobile social networks are the only way they are able to access the Internet.  The mobile social networking platform is popular amongst truck drivers and cab drivers who are on the road a lot and far from their computers, as well as in countries like South Africa, India and Indonesia where many people just don’t have personal computers or Internet.  Soldiers are also big users of mobile social networks.

Antonio Vince Staybol offered up a few interesting facts about itsmy.com, which illustrate how mobile social networks are being used.  itsmy.com has a total of 2.5 million users who, on average, spend 52 hours a month on the itsmy.com mobile site.  60% of these users don’t have an email address and 46% have never used an online social network and may not even know what one is.  The bulk of these users are aged from 21 to 35.  However, mobile social networks are growing in popularity amongst the older crowd with users up to 60.  According to the panel, the reason for this is that mobile social networks are easier to understand– there are only 9 buttons on a phone so the whole process is much more simplified than social networks on the Web.

Want to learn more?  Watch my videos of the panel discussion below.