A new study claims that 140 million consumers worldwide are expected to use mobile social networks by 2013 as the toggling between online and mobile increases.

This increase in usage of mobile social networking is projected to generate more than $410 million in subscription revenues, according to ABI Research, New York.

"The younger demographics are rapidly adopting various forms of communications and social media such as IM [and] photo messaging on the phone," said ABI research director Michael Wolf.

"On the PC, they are well entrenched in social networking as it is largely the system by which they communicate," he said. "It has actually, I would venture to say for quite a large number of these consumers, replaced email and IM systems. It's a natural that the two would come together."

In general, research shows that consumers don't want different social network homes by domain.

"They want a unified social network hub regardless of domain, PC or mobile," Mr. Wolf said. "Because of these, they are choosing to simply connect with their existing brand through an application for the handset or through a mobile Web page."

A corollary of that trend is the increased loyalty that social-network users will have in the sites they use. Put simply, they are less likely to leave that social network if it offers both online and mobile flexibility.

"We will see increased ties between online and mobile communities, even those mobile social networks that aren't as predominant online, through feed-based update services like Friendfeed," Mr. Wolf said.

"Also, the mobile Web and the online Web are increasingly becoming one and the same, though there still are significant differences in the gateways and infrastructure, let alone the actual consumer access devices, which means it's important to have optimized experiences for each screen," he said.

That said, subscriber growth for mobile social networking will be gradual in the next three to four years, but then increase rapidly. Increased usage in emerging markets such as Brazil, Russia, India and China will contribute to the growth.

Killer app?
Indeed, another study released yesterday by JupiterResearch claims that a range of events including the iPhone's launch and the growth of social networks among teenagers and young adults is altering consumer expectations of mobile services.

Not surprisingly, social networks have the potential to become a killer application for mobile phones, according to JupiterResearch analyst Neil Strother.

"Even though there's low adoption of mobile social networking activity, there's an opportunity here both for carriers and handset manufacturers to enable the growth of social networks on phones," Mr. Strother said.

"In other words, we know that social networks are strong online, but migrating that to mobile is not trivial," he said. "Making access easier and linking all the pieces is key."

Handset manufacturers are already making a play for the mobile social media market by integrating mobile and PC experiences.

Take Nokia. The Finnish company offers a one-click posting option for photos and videos from the camera application on Nokia mobile phones to its Ovi online media sharing site.

Such mobility will only increase as more companies clamp down on usage of non-work sites or services from players such as Yahoo or Microsoft's Hotmail. There is anecdotal evidence that consumers are accessing such services directly from their Web-enabled mobile phones.

Add to that phenomenon the global contribution.

"On a global scale, there's a lot of opportunity in online, whether it's social networking or other services, because many of these people don't have access to online and they're not likely to get it anytime soon," Mr. Strother said.

"So the mobile phone becomes the high-tech center of their universe," he said.

Monetization issues
JupiterResearch data show that 13 percent of mobile phone owners access social networks on their mobile phones versus 49 percent of PC owners accessing those services on their computers.

"So I think there's lots of room for this potential growth," Mr. Strother said. "Question is, how will you monetize mobile social networks? I think the monetization is a challenge, but people will accept some look at ads.

"The content is there, but again turning that wheel into a marketing opportunity is fairly early," he said. "There's not a lot of room for multiple ads and banners on mobile social networks."

That is the social network's monetization challenge.

"I think that advertising will slowly grow in importance, but it may be that much of the advertising pay-back will be through having them go online," ABI's Mr. Wolf said.

"I think offering location-centric information and services, as well as specials, will be of major importance," he said. "Location-based mobile social networking can be both fee-based as well as advertising-based."

Carriers have their own monetization concerns, too. Fees may provide an answer.

ABI expects that mobile versions of social networks will follow MySpace and Facebook's example of offering free browser-based access. But that limits the carriers' revenue to a charge for data usage.

Mr. Wolf suggests that carriers should ideally be able to charge a $1.99 or $2.99 monthly fee to access mobile social networks as an application on the phone. In other words, he recommends a recurring-fee model.

But there is no doubt that carriers will record an increase in data revenue from the growing popularity of mobile social networking.

"Especially as we see more robust forms of communication such as video as well as imaging sent through the mobile social portals," Mr. Wolf said, "and as we see consumers start to centralize their media consumption through the mobile social network, which is what has already started to happen in the online world."