The new study, which was initially presented at the Oct-2011 Pivot Conference held in New York City, explores the preferences social consumers across a broad range of categories.
Below, additional findings from the Pivot Conference study, conducted with Crowdtap.
Top Smartphone Platforms
Among social consumers surveyed, the iPhone is the most popular mobile platform for accessing social apps with 44% of market penetration, followed by Android with 30% and BlackBerry with 14%.
Top Social Apps
Facebook Mobile dominates social apps use: 83% of social consumers use the application, while more than one-third (35%) use Twitter Mobile. Notably, more than three in ten social consumers (31%) use Foursquare.
Fewer social consumers depend on LinkedIn Mobile (13%) and geo-location service Gowalla (10%) for accessing social platforms.
Not for Nothing
Social consumers make it clear they expect something special from brands in exchange for social interaction: 83% say they want deals and promos in exchange for engagement, 70% want socially oriented loyalty programs, 58% want access to exclusive content, and 55% want the ability to offer feedback on new and/or unreleased products.
Top Group-Buying Apps
When looking for deals, most (93%) social consumers use online deal sites, and many use several.
Among the most popular apps (as of October 2011), social consumers cited Groupon (76%) and Coupons.com ( 69%). Notably, Facebook Deals, with 56% share in October, was closed by the company in late 2011, after the survey was fielded.
Though in fourth place as of October (with 48%), Living Social will likely claim some of the market share left by Facebook's exit.
Although Google has no presence in deals per se, when it comes to checking prices, 79% of social consumers turn to Google. Moreover, Google is even stronger than Amazon (58%), the dominant online retailer.
Other key findings:
- Online Gaming: Zynga (Farmville, Mafia Wars, Words with Friends, Zynga Poker) is the most popular games platform on mobile with 61% of market share, followed by World of Warcraft (33%), Second Life (21%), Playdom (Wild Ones) (15%), and ngmoco (We Rule) (14%).
- Content Sharing: The most popular types of information to share are music (54%) and video (53%), followed by location check‐ins (42%); 31% of social consumers say they don't share information and want most of their social activity kept private.
- Top Photo Services: Color (26%), CameraBag (25%), and Dailybooth (25%) are nearly tied for the top mobile photo-sharing service, followed by Darkroom (15%) and Instagram (14%).
About the data: The Pivot Conference research is based on a survey of 500 consumers who indicated high activity in social networking. Consumers were drawn from Crowdtap online consumer panels, October 6‐13, 2011.
