Virgin Mobile’s Facebook application to woo mobile users

They say you can’t put a price on friendship. But Virgin Mobile has just done that. According to their latest offer, your friends can help you earn free mobile airtime.

Virgin Mobile has designed a Facebook application called Fund My Phone, which is nothing but an improved, online version of Sugar Mama. The only difference is, in Sugar Mama you get free airtime if you watch ads whereas in Fund My Phone, you get free airtime even if your friends watch ads.

All you need to do is, add the ‘Fund My Phone’ application to your Facebook profile and ask your friends to take a look at it. For every minute they spend watching stuff, you get free airtime.

Virgin Mobile has called this a ‘natural next step’ in connecting to their customers. It believes that the strong interaction between Facebook members will help its application reach plenty of new users easily. The good response that Sugar Mama got is also considered a reason for this step by many in the industry.

I’d have to say this is a good idea, though I’m not sure if I can convince my friends to watch ads on my Facebook profile. However, we could make an arrangement. I watch ads on someone else’s profile and someone else, preferably a friend of mine, watches ads on my profile. And we both get free airtime. Is it a bad idea? What do you say?

Categories: Cell Phone Advertising, All things mobile phones.

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Mobile social networking rapidly gaining popularity

Social networking is the in-thing now and it’s evident from the number of people who access MySpace and Facebook dutifully every day. In fact, people are so much into these sites that they want to be connected all the time. However, you can’t carry a laptop all the time and you can’t go to a browsing center ten times a day to update your status in your Facebook profile and to catch up with your friends. So, what do you do? Simple – you access these sites in your mobile phone.

The practice of accessing social networking sites on mobile phones, called mobile social networking, is becoming more and more popular with mobile users these days. The biggest reason is the iPhone. It literally changed the way people perceived mobile phones and now iPhone users top the chart in mobile internet usage.

According to statistics, more than 85% of iPhone users access the internet from their phones. This is an incredible number, to say the least. Smart phone users come second in this list. People, especially young ones, who have internet facility in their phone, access social networking sites regularly.

A report from Nielson says that 1.7% of all mobile users in the U.K. visited social networking sites on their cell phones regularly. It’s 1.6% in the U.S., 0.8% in Spain, 0.6% in Italy, and 0.2% in Germany. Experts predict that these numbers will more than double in about two years and mobile social networking will become popular big time.

MySpace, followed by Facebook, is the most accessed social networking site on mobile phones. In December 2007 alone, the site had close to 3 million visits from mobile users. In the U.S. and all over Europe, there are tens of thousands of regular mobile users who log into MySpace regularly. We’ve already seen how popular MySpace can be, but still these numbers are incredible.

I think these numbers will have a significant impact on mobile service prices in the coming days. Thanks to this overwhelming popularity of mobile social networking and other similar things, operators might be tempted to cut down the rates for data plans. One example for this would be Vodafone UK. In its latest monthly plans, it has added unlimited internet access as a standard feature. We might as well see other companies follow suit.

Categories: Apple iPhone, All things mobile phones, Mobile Social Networking.

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