Nielsen study: Mobile driving big-time growth in social media and social TV behavior

By Cory Bergman 

Nielsen’s just-released “Social Media Report” for 2012 drills deep on mobile, illustrating the inexorable relationship between social and mobile devices. “Time spent on mobile apps and the mobile web account for 63% of the year-over-year growth in overall time spent using social media,” the report said. Specifically, mobile apps, which dominate over mobile web in time spent.

Here’s the breakdown of social networks by mobile reach and time spent:

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Not only for social platforms, but apps (+120%) continue to grow in time spent at a faster rate than mobile web (+22%) overall, Nielsen says.

All of this mobile/social growth reinforces social TV behavior. As you may have seen from Nielsen’s cross-platform report that we published last month, second-screen interaction is becoming routine behavior: 41% of tablet owners and 38% of smartphone owners use their device daily in front of the TV screen. Here’s how the behavior is distributed:

It’s no surprise that Twitter is a big driver. In June alone, one-third of Twitter’s active users tweeted at least once about TV, an increase of 27% since the beginning of the year:

Here’s a link to the full report from Nielsen, and keep an eye on our research section for fresh studies about social TV and the second screen.

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