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Smartphone users check Facebook 14 times a day, study says

John Makely / msnbc.com
John Makely / msnbc.com

People with smartphones check their Facebook pages an average of 14 times each day. They scroll through news feeds while running errands, comment on friends' posts while shopping or at the gym, post a photo of their food plate before dinner. This adds up to an average of about 32 minutes of Facebook time on their phone ... every day.

These details come from a new study, sponsored by Facebook and conducted by data crunchers at the analytics firm IDC. The company surveyed Android and iOS users in the U.S., and 7,446 men and women between the ages of 18 and 44 shared details about their daily Facebook and smartphone habits.

On average, this group spent about two and a half hours every day on their smartphones. The most frequently used application on a smartphone? Email, followed by Facebook.

Almost half the group — 44 percent — used their phones as an alarm clock (I know I do), and 79 percent checked their phones within the first 15 minutes of waking up (guilty, once again).

When was the last time your phone wasn't next to you or in the same room? 25 percent of the survey group couldn't remember the last time that happened. And 79 percent of the group admitted their phones were out of reach for just two hours every day.

As you might imagine, social phone time in general doubled on weekends, when folks texted their friends and significant others, and called or emailed their parents and kids.

Seventy percent of their study group accessed Facebook from their phones — to catch up on news feed updates, mostly — and 61 percent used it daily. On average, Facebook took up a quarter of social time on people's phones, the rest used up mostly by calling and texting.

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Nidhi Subbaraman writes about technology and science. Follow her on Twitter and Google+.