Honey, I shrunk our social media!

Like the chocolate that unwittingly collides with the peanut butter in the classic Reese's candy ads on television (or was it the other way around?), Facebook was bound to run into the wonderful world of mobile devices - a match made in heaven.

As more and more people leave their PC's behind for portable smartphones and tablets it was only a matter of time before they began using social media on these mobile devices, which are in turn impacting how we engage with one another using social media - now we can, for instance, "geolocate" friends, family and even potential dates while on the go with our smartphones.

According to a report from Juniper Research, as cited at marketwatch.com, "the continuing increase in smartphone adoption and the rise of geosocial networking will push the number of mobile social media users from 650 million (in 2011) to 1.3 billion by 2016; more than the total number of social media users on all platforms today."

The report, moreover, as cited at technorati.com, found "the 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."

The technorati.com story also cites a separate survey on mobile content consumption that underscores how our attention spans are even lower on mobile devices than they used to be on the bigger screens of PC's.

According to this Digital News Test Kitchen smartphone user survey of 517 college students at the University of Colorado and several other universities and colleges around the U.S. users typically consumed, as summed up by technorati.com:

a) Less than three paragraphs of text
b) Less than 30 seconds of audio
c) Less than one minute of video

The social and digital media research firm mediabadger, moreover, has underscored that "older folk" are also getting in on the act, not just college kids and Millennials: "Generation X and Boomers alike are increasingly using mobile phones. And we found that overall, they are more likely (62%) to use a mobile device to post to social networking services such as Facebook."

Marketing expert Heidi Cohen has also cited some interesting key mobile social media facts:

1) "Social media usage on mobile devices continues to grow with 49.4million users projected in 2011; a 27% increase from 2010 according to eMarketer."

2) "Social media network usage on mobile internet and mobile phones continues to increase as a percentage of users. This is attributable to the fact that participants view social media as a communications format."

Facebook, meanwhile, "expects its next 1 billion users to come mainly from mobile devices, rather than desktop computers," according to a recent financialpost.com report by Tech Desk Editor Matt Hartley on "Facebook's looming mobile conundrum."

This article, which focuses on the advertising dilemma Facebook, er, faces, as more and more users go mobile, underscores Facebook's need to come up with a new "mobile strategy" just as Facebook went public on February 1, 2012 and outlined its own new vision for itself. 

"Increasingly, Facebook’s ardent users are checking in via mobile devices. In December, 2011, 425 million users checked into Facebook from a mobile device at least once, more than half the company’s global user base," Hartley reports, adding that this could be Facebook's "biggest problem" - from an advertising standpoint, that is.

While this very well may be the case for Facebook as a company, it bodes well for Apple and other makers of mobile devices on the market.

The upshot: Mobile devices are influencing how we engage with one another via social media and possibly even shaping our social behavior through geosocial networks.