As the first half of 2009 comes to a finish, we wanted to look at a few different social media sites and compare their respective growths and recent changes. We’re not going to tell you which social media platform is best, because in our experience, different social media sites are better or worse for different needs, uses, people, and firms. Instead, we’ll provide some statistics and data and let you tell us what you think.
- Data from Nielsen Online continues to demonstrate an upward trend in the time individuals spend on both social networking and blog sites. Today’s numbers are the highest to date. In the past year, the total minutes spent online increased 82%and the average time per person increased 67%, according to Nielsen research from May, 2009.
- Surprise, Surprise: This year’s fastest growing brand in social media is Twitter, with an astonishing 1448% increase in users (May 2008 saw 1.2 million unique Twitter visitors while in May 2009 numbers reached 18.2 million).
- As of May 2009, Facebook enjoyed its 7th straight month as the #1 social networking site (ranked by unique visitors) with 144.3 million unique visitors to the site.
- Myspace.com continued to be the number one social media site rankings were measured based on video streaming traffic (116.1 million video streams).
- Nielsen’s latest report showed that while Twitter continues to grow, its growth has begun to tapper slightly.
- However, the average time that individuals spent on Twitter has continued to increase. In a 1 year span from May 2008 to May 2009, reports show that the average time per user, spent on Twitter rose from 6 min., 19 sec. to 17 min., 21 sec.
How well do you fit the reports? Do you spend the most time on Facebook? Are you spending more or less time on Twitter than the average user? Have you streamed videos on MySpace?
For more information on the Nielsen Online Report, published in May 2009, visit http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/nielsen_pr_090619.pdf