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Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Dougherty - North America
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Social networks displacing e-cards
February 25, 2010
We’re often thinking about what people are doing on social networks and one of the most common uses is keeping in touch with friends and family, especially for birthday greetings and holiday messages. Once the domain of e-greetings, social networks have instead become the common place to send & post messages. While the traffic to social networks continues to climb, the market share of visits to websites in the E-Greetings has declined each month year-over-year each month from January 2009 through January 2010. During the two peak months for E-Greetings category, February and December, visits decreased 24% and 16%, respectively.
On specific holidays, the same trend occurred, with the market share of visits to E-Greetings websites down, while the Social Networking category has increased. The only exception is Mother’s Day, where both are down and more people may be spending the day with their mothers rather than using social networks. Key holidays for the E-Greetings category, Valentine’s Day and Christmas Day, were both down 29% and 27%, respectively. Holidays have historically been a popular day for using social networks and Facebook, for example, became the most visited website on both Christmas Day and New Year’s Day, surpassing Google.
While there are many activities taking place on social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter, birthday (easy to remember the dates when other friends post messages) and holiday greetings appear to be eroding traffic away from the E-Greetings category.
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Posted by Heather Dougherty at 05:23 PM
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In Categories Egreetings | Facebook | Social Networking
Comments
So true! I remember how huge the online greeting cards used to be. You're right - we don't really need them much anymore, do we? Facebook, especially, is to blame.
Great points...
-Honey
Posted by Honey | March 15, 2010 06:32 PM
Technology is going so fast nowadays that now even e-mail is in decline compared to social network messages. No wonder the use of e-cards is decreasing.
Posted by Sennheiser IE8 | January 11, 2011 05:55 PM
It's an interesting study. I never thought about it, but it doesn't surprise me.
Posted by 3D TV | January 12, 2011 08:14 PM
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Interesting logs regarding greetings and social networks. I remember when i had internet surfing in about 1998 i used to send greetings to my family members who had a birthday, new year etc.. But when web 2.0 concept came and social communities came and people used to get interacted more with the social networks like facebook so they had came an option to send messages over that channel either it could be birthdays, new year etc..
Posted by Online Auction | March 4, 2010 12:44 AM