By Charlotte Miller

The report found that the growing trend to integrate social, local and mobile experiences is driving the geosocial phenomena. People want to find out not only what their friends are doing, but also their location and other available activities in the area. Geosocial networks are particularly suited to the mobile space as most smartphones now include GPS, and have an ‘always on, always connected’ experience.

Location comes to dating

The mobile dating market is also embracing geosocial. Location and instant messaging are the driving forces behind a number of successful services, particularly those targeted at younger demographics who consider these to be key features. The mobile dating market is expected to be worth $2.3 billion by 2016, up from $1 billion this year.

Location features on smartphones are opening up a new side of both dating and social networking. Adding location features to a service makes the service local to the user. This will be a key feature for mobile dating services – why send emails to someone hundreds of miles away when you can exchange instant messages with someone only hundreds of meters away? Other key findings from the report include:

• Spend on advertising targeted at tablets is expected to account for almost half of total mobile social media advertising spend by 2016.

The Mobile Social Media whitepaper is available to download from the Juniper website together with further details of the full study.

About the author

Charlotte Miller works at Juniper Research, which provides research and analytical services to the global hi-tech communications sector, providing consultancy, analyst reports and industry commentary.