Mike Andrew Consulting

Social Networks Continue Strong Growth

By mike, Oct 12 in blog with 0 comments

Facebook continues strong growth amongst US social networks

Social Network growth continues in the US with Facebook surging ahead, the social media site just keeps on going from strength to strength with its major competitor MySpace losing ground. Hitwise has just released new research on the trends within the social sites in the USA.

Hitwise puts the social network’s market share of U.S. Internet visits up on a month-over-month basis, way up on a year-over-year basis, and it made significant gains in the “time spent” category, too.

Hitwise created a custom category of social networking sites, and within it, Facebook’s market share was 58.59 percent in September of this year. That puts it up by a fair amount over its standing of 55.15 percent in August.

Then, moving further back in time, the 19.94 percent share it controlled in September of 2008 is just tiny by comparison. Indeed, Facebook pulled off a 194 percent year-over-year increase.

As for the number of minutes Facebook users are spending on the site, Hitwise found that it increased by an impressive 23 percent since the same time last year.

Flavour of the year micro blogging site Twitter, and MySpace weren’t nearly so lucky. Twitters market share has skyrocketed by 1,170 percent year-over-year, but the time spent figure has decreased by a whopping 56 percent. And MySpace lost ground in both categories, by 55 percent and 12 percent, respectively.

This all comes on top of another interesting piece of research, over 1400 CIO’s within US companies or 54% don’t allow employees to visit social network sites for any reason whist they are at work.

About the author

Mike Andrew has been working with the Internet and small business for over 12 years. Mike has been a keynote speaker at conventions and seminars and conducted social media training sessions all over the world. Mike has an extensive media background having worked in electronic media for over 30 years. Mike specialises in social media and Internet marketing strategy, SEO techniques and search engine marketing campaigns. His articles appear on numerous blogs around the web as well as national magazines.