Social Networking One of the Web’s Top Activities

Reprinted from KenRadio

Social networking continued to gain momentum in 2009 with nearly 4 out of 5 Internet users visiting a social networking site in December 2009. The activity now accounts for 11% of all time spent online in the U.S., making it one of the most engaging activities across the Web, according to a new study by comScore.

2009 proved to be a landmark year in the U.S. social networking market, as category leader Facebook and upstart network Twitter both posted triple-digit growth. Facebook surged to the #1 position among social networks for the first time in May and continued its strong growth trajectory throughout the year, finishing with 112 million visitors in December 2009, up 105% during the year. Twitter finished the year with nearly 20 million visitors to its website, up from just 2 million visitors from the previous year. Much of Twitter’s extraordinary audience growth occurred during the first few months of 2009, at one point jumping from 4 million visitors to 17 million visitors between February and April. Meanwhile, 2008 category leader MySpace has experienced some softening in its audience; however, a new strategic focus on entertainment content is exhibiting signs of success with MySpace Music having grown 92% in the past year.

In addition to its surging population of users, Facebook grew substantially across nearly every performance metric in 2009. Unique visitors, page views, and total time spent all increased by a factor of two or more. Frequency metrics such as average minutes per usage day (up 6%) and average usage days per visitors (up 37%) also saw gains. As more people use Facebook more frequently, the site has grown to account for three times as much total time spent online as it did last year. The only metric by which Facebook decreased was the average minutes per visit (down 11%), which can likely be attributed to the increasing frequency with which people are visiting the site.

An analysis of demographic composition of Facebook, MySpace and Twitter users revealed important differences that reflect their appeal to various audiences. MySpace saw its user composition shift toward younger audience segments in 2009, with people age 24 and younger now comprising 44.4% of the site’s audience, up more than 7% points from the previous year. Facebook’s audience, by contrast, was evenly split between those younger and older than 35 years of age. The most noticeable demographic shift on Facebook during the year occurred with 25-34 year olds, who now account for 23& of the audience, up from 18.8% last year.

As Twitter’s audience grew in 2009, the site experienced interesting shifts in its demographic composition. All demographic segments achieved substantial gains in visitors, but certain segments grew more rapidly than others to gain in terms of their share of audience. The initial success of Twitter was largely driven by users in the 25-54 year old age segment, which made up 65% of all visitors to the site in December 2008, with 18-24 year olds accounting for just 9% of visitors. This older age skew varied dramatically from the traditional social media early adopter model, in which younger users tend to drive the lion’s share of usage. Despite Twitter’s initially older skew, as it gained widespread popularity with the help of celebrity Tweeters and mainstream media coverage, younger users flooded to the site in large numbers, with those under age 18 (up 6.2 percentage points) and 18-24 year olds (up 7.9 percentage points) representing the fastest growing demographic segments.