If you’re the type to wait for hard data before readjusting your marketing to take in social media, prepare to be persuaded: Not one or two but a handful of recent metrics and studies point to the rise of Facebook as a place where users spend increasing portions of their time and do increasing amounts of their content sharing.
Starting with share of audience time, Nielsen’s monthly study of Internet usage found that the average time users spent on Facebook in February 2010 grew by 10% was 6 hours and more than 27 minutes. That’s down 8% from the just over seven hours the average Facebook user spent on the site in January—a 10% jump over December 2009’s level. But it’s still far above the time spent with the second-most visited Internet brand, the content sites owned by Yahoo, where users spent 2 hours and 17 minutes of their time on average in February.
The Nielsen study looks at Internet usage both at home and at work.
According to Nielsen’s figures, the Google, Microsoft and Yahoo site families still drew millions more unique visitors during the month than Facebook’s 118.8 million. In terms of collections of branded content, however, Nielsen placed Facebook third for the month in unique traffic, behind Google and Yahoo but ahead of the sites carrying content for Microsoft/Bing/Windows Live.
But another new study from analytics service Hitwise, released yesterday, finds that measured by share of total U.S. internet visits, Facebook was the most popular Web site in the U.S for the week ending March 13. With a current 7.07% of all site visits, the social net barely edged out longtime Web leader Google, which had a 7.03% share of the traffic during that same week.
In a post at the Hitwise blog site, analyst Heather Dougherty points out that while Facebook had broken through to the top daily ranks among U.S. Web sites last Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and New Year’s Day and also led for the weekend of march 6-7, this is the first time the sited has kept its lead over Google for an entire week.
Dougherty also points out that Facebook’s market share of visits for that week were up 185% compared to the same week in 2009, while Google posted an increase in weekly traffic of only 9% year over year. Together, the two sites accounted for 14% of all U.S. web visits from March 7 through March 13 2010.
It should be noted that Hitwise’s metrics treat Yahoo Mail and Yahoo as two separate properties and ranked them third and fourth in the U.S. for that week, with market shares of 3.8% and 3.67% respectively.
Finally a study on the TechCrunch blog site by Erick Schonfeld looks at where some of the most important sharing platforms on the Web report most of their activity coming from, using 30-day data from widget platform Gigya, which powers sharing on some 5,000 web site including NBA.com, PGA.com, Answers.com and Reuters.
Schonfeld’s conclusion is that Facebook was responsible for about 44% of the content shared on the Gigya network from mid-January to mid-February of this year. Twitter came second in the sharing sweepstakes for the month with 29% of the shared content that moved over Gigya. Yahoo was third with 18%, and MySpace was fourth for the month with 9%.
“For many sites on the Web, social traffic coming through Facebook, Twitter and MySpace is beginning to rival, and in some case overtake, search traffic as the single biggest source of traffic,” Schonfeld writes. “What isn’t easily appreciated is the extent to which such social sharing is tied to different identity and authentication platforms across the web. If you can log into a site easily using your Facebook or Twitter account, it is easier to broadcast links from that site to your friends.”
In an update to his post, Schonfeld reports that sharing data for the same 30-day period from rival widget maker AddThis reaffirms Facebook’s number one sharing status but eats away at the size of that lead. According to the AddThis stats, Facebook accounted for 33% of the content shared on the company’s network. Twitter (9%), Google (6%) and MySpace trailed not only Facebook but also came in behind email (13%), print (9%) and Favorites (8%)—three options AddThis offers users as a way to share content they like.
Network
