More than a quarter of all American adults—28 percent—use mobile or social location-based services of some kind, according to a new survey in the US.

Published: 07 Sep 2011

More than a quarter of all American adults—28 percent—use mobile or social location-based services of some kind, according to a new survey in the US.

The survey by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project indicates that it includes anyone who takes part in one or more of the following activities:

• 28 percent of cell owners use phones to get directions or recommendations based on their current location—that works out to 23 percent of all adults.

• A much smaller number (five percent of cell owners, equaling four percent of all adults) use their phones to check in to locations using geo-social services such as Foursquare or Gowalla. Smartphone owners are especially likely to use these services on their phones.

• Nine percent of internet users set up social media services such as Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn so that their location is automatically included in their posts on those services. That works out to seven percent of all adults.

Taken together, 28 percent of U.S. adults do at least one of these activities either online or using their mobile phones—and many users do several of them. The results are based on a national telephone survey of 2,277 adults conducted April 26-May 22, 2011.

Several groups have higher-than-average rates of location service usage, including:

• Smartphone owners – One in ten smartphone owners (12 percent) have used a geosocial (“check in”) service such as Foursquare or Gowalla, and 55 percent of smartphone owners have used a location-based information service. Almost six in ten smartphone owners (58 percent) use at least one of these services. These are all well above the average for cell owners as a whole.

• Younger users – Smartphone owners ages 18-49 are more likely than those over 50 to use either geosocial or location-based services on their phones. (There are no significant differences among social media users by age in regard to automatic location-tagging.)

When it comes to other mobile activities, 59 percent of smartphone owners use their phone to access social networking sites, and 15 percent use their phone to access Twitter.