1 in 5 people rate mobile social networks as “poor”, says Colibria

Messaging and social networking company Colibria has revealed research results about what mobile users want from social networking. 2,000 online respondents were surveyed in the UK. 43% of users only describe their experience as average, with a further 20% rating access as poor or very poor.

Other points of interest:

Almost 40% of 18-45 year olds said they would prefer it if MoSos pushed updates straight to their mobile.

Only 21% of 18-45 year olds signed up with a fixed social network access their service over their mobile

Of those who do already access their social networks via their phone, 65% prefer to do it through a device’s internet browser, whilst 28% use a dedicated application.

Almost one third (31%) said that messages are what they would most like to receive on their mobile when checking their social networks

Single log-in access across multiple social networks is the most popular option for improving the experience via mobile (14%)

Only 16% of those asked used social networks excluding MySpace and Facebook

78% use the instant messaging functionality available on their respective social networking sites

From the release:

Lars Kristian Roland, CTO of Colibria, commented ‘‘This survey shows that mobile users want to be able to enjoy a seamless, consistent, rich experience across all of their social networks on the mobile. Put simply, a truly interactive experience is required from operators for the mass adoption of social networking on mobile to become a reality and mirror the success of the fixed world.’’

What we think?

Much like yesterdays news about mobile devices, this highlights how mobile services are held back by being awkward and difficult to use. People are crying for integrated, intuitive services. While these services do exist, consumers don’t know about them. This repeating problem seems to be going in circles. Consumers don’t know how to use the mobile web, so it’s hard to get information on the mobile web to them. How do you break that cycle?