Social media usage across the five leading European markets (France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK) rose 44% in the past year, according to data from digital market information provider comScore, with the UK leading the way within the EU5 group.

As reported by recruiter.co.uk yesterday, 17% of people in the UK use mobile devices to search for new job opportunities and 6% of traffic to jobs site Retailmoves.com, who launched their jobseekers iPhone app yesterday, comes from mobile use.

September 2011 data showed 55.1m mobile users logging in to social media on their phone in the EU5, which represents just under a quarter of total mobile users, and is a large rise compared to the same month in 2010.

Jeremy Copp, comScore Europe vice president for mobile, says the rise has been “driven largely by the growth in smartphone adoption”, adding: “It will be interesting to see how social behaviours on the mobile platform further evolve.”

Facebook was used by 71% of the EU5 mobile social networking audience, a 54% rise from the past year, and while Twitter’s usage was around a quarter of Facebook’s, the growth in its mobile users was double that, at 115%. LinkedIn’s market share was again smaller, but again had an even larger rise in mobile users, at 134%.

Britain was the leading EU5 nation in all but one of the eight major metrics measured in the report – listening to music – where it was 0.4% down on the average.

Germany lagged notably behind France, Italy and Spain, as it was behind the average in all of the data points.