comScore has released interesting numbers based on their own data pointing to a 37% rise in the number of US residents accessing social sites and blogs on their mobiles…

Social Networking On-The-Go: U.S. Mobile Social Media Audience Grows 37 Percent in the Past Year – comScore, Inc: “In August 2011, more than 72.2 million people accessed social networking sites or blogs on their mobile device, an increase of 37 percent from the previous year. Nearly 40 million U.S. mobile users, more than half of the mobile social media audience, access these sites almost every day, demonstrating the importance of this activity to people’s daily routines.”

As a middle school teacher, I anecdotally see more students preferring devices like the iPhone, iPads or Androids (and even Blackberry’s) to laptops and netbooks for web access both in class and in their personal lives.

Frequently, I’m seeing my students go straight to the respective App Store on their devices to see if a site or source mentioned in class has an app before they go to the web to search.

However, this doesn’t mean that affiliates must have a well developed app that is easy to find in an App Store for success.

Nevertheless, if you are using mobile sites such as Facebook Ads or Twitter mentions in your marketing campaigns, it is essential that the action page being linked to is mobile friendly (handy WordPress and bulletin board plugins abound for this type of thing).

Affiliates should start (or continue) to enhance the mobile experience of their sites and traffic streams as this transition will occur rapidly in the next 3-5 years based on existing trends.

This includes not only optimizing a click-through page for iOS and HTML5, but also creatively utilizing text messaging and quick reply functionalities of services such as Twitter.

We are literally in the midst of a transition from laptop/desktop based computing and browsing as the norm into a mobile dominated future. There will certainly be those of us who rely heavily on “trucks” (as Steve Jobs referred to desktops and laptops) to do what we do, but for “casual” users, mobiles will be the norm.