Last week (9 June 2010) I was lucky enough to listen to Telstra CFO John Stanhope addressed the annual Stockbrokers Association of Australia conference here in Melbourne.
One of the points he reinforced was about the boom in social networks via mobile.
Of the five million 3G mobile customers he advised that over 3.6M were using Facebook via a mobile. This is a remarkable figure when you consider it’s 72% of their total users on the network.
Furthermore, a Telstra press release confirmed that while the growth of Facebook over the past 12 months was surpassed by Twitter (450 percent versus 390 percent in the same period), that Facebook is still by far the most accessed social networking site by Telstra’s mobile customer base.
What one can take from all this is it’s becoming increasingly common for people in Australia to not only access the Internet from mobile phones, but use it as their sole access to social media. For some this may be of no surprise – I remember a stat once that suggested that for many Chinese the mobile Internet will be their first experience of broadband Internet – but for it me it raises some interesting questions. For example;
- How do users “Tweeting” from their mobile phones effect SMS revenue?
- Will users make calls to friends on their mobile in transit when they can just look them up on Facebook?
Telstra is clearly addressing these same concerns as the company has launched its new Tribe service for Next G customers. Described as a combination of Facebook, Twitter and MySpace in a single location, the new service allows customers to manage all of their social profile from a single portal that can be accessed from a range of phones and subject to unmetered rates – a cheap way to tweet to your heart’s content.
To access it Telstra customers simply browse to http://tribe.telstra.com from their mobile browser. How will they monetize this offering? We don’t know yet – maybe through loyalty, maybe through advertise, but regardless you must be a paying subscriber to Telstra’s 3G network to gain access.
Oh, and by the way if you are a heavy user of Social Networks via Mobile you will typically use it between 8pm and 10pm and this peaks on Thursdays. Saturdays are the quietest because, funny enough, we are connecting with friends and family “face-to-face” – what I like to think is the difference between networking and having a relationship.
Yeah I don’t recommend it. Use the free Telstra Facebook site. Much better
Thats a genuinely good post with essential Facts. Thanks for your support.