Third of US Smartphone Owners on Social Media an Hour a Day

Indian-family-using-phone-smaller.jpg80 per cent of US smartphone owners are making use of social networking apps at least once a day, with 35 per cent spending at least an hour a day on social media via their mobiles, new research from Parks Associates has revealed.

While voice calls and texting are still the dominant activities on smartphones, the study found that consumers are embracing a multitude of new use cases as smartphones become more multifunctional and central to everyday life.

70 per cent of smartphone users now watch at least one short streaming video clip on their phone every day, while 20 per cent are spending more than 30 minutes a day doing so. In addition to short clips like YouTube content or music videos, consumption of long streaming videos, such as movies or TV shows, is also on the rise. 40 per cent of users watch long-form content once a day, with most of them doing so for over 30 minutes a day.

“Consumer appetite for mobile data is very strong, but currently most subscribers use less than half of their allotted data, while those with high data plans use even less,” said Harry Wang, director of health & mobile product research at Parks Associated. “For mobile operators, pushing consumers to sign up for a bigger data plan will have its limits.

“More and more consumers will start to compare payment to data usage and discover that they are eating a small portion but paying the price of a family-sized meal.”

Perhaps crucially for mobile operators, data sharing continues to play a large role in mobile app usage, with roughly half of US smartphone owners with limited data plans sharing allowances across multiple devices, and 87 per cent of that cohort sharing it across multiple smartphones.