Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK
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Facebook: 1 in 50 UK Internet visits
January 15, 2008
Facebook’s market share of UK internet visits to All Categories increased to 2.01% in December. The social networking website accounted for one in every fifty UK internet visits in the last month of 2007, with its market share peaking on Christmas Day. As the chart below illustrates, Facebook’s market share has increased 10-fold over the past 12 months.
Our custom category of the top 25 social networks also peaked over Christmas, and accounted for one in every 14 UK internet visits on the big day. Even more significantly, as the social networks’ market share has increased, so has their capacity to deliver traffic to other sites. Social networks accounted for 7.04% of upstream traffic to All Categories in December. As the table below illustrates, facebook.com, bebo.com and myspace.com were all included in the top 10 individual URLs sending traffic to other websites last month.
This all goes to prove that 2008 will be an even bigger year for social networks than 2007, and that companies, governments and NGOs all need strategies in place to take advantage of this growth. Fortunately help is at hand, as we have just published a report on this very topic. Our new White Paper, The Impact of Social Networking in the UK, looks at the growth of social networks, including analysis of who's really using social networking websites, as well as our predictions for the impact they will have in 2008. The paper also features insight from our colleagues at Experian Integrated Marketing on how marketers should look to build their 2008 social media marketing strategies.
You can download a copy of the report here.
On 24 January we will also be hosting a live webinar, Social Networking in 2008, which you can register for here.
Posted by Robin Goad at 10:16 AM
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- Social networks to get even bigger in 2008? (Inside 123-reg)
Just stumbed across an interesting piece from Robin Goad over at Hitwise about Facebook and other social networks. If you were in any doubt about whether Facebook has had an impact on how we use the internet, this will convince you. According to Hitwi... [Read More]
Comments
Facebook is on the decline. Is this 1 in 50 non-adult visits? lol
Posted by SEO RI | January 15, 2008 11:47 PM
So we're not so worried about the long tail anymore ? I thought that buzzword was still good for a few blog posts yet.
As far as I can see, the top ten upstream sites account for almost exactly 50% of all visits. Unless these stats are not representative of the internet at large, then the long tail isn't really all that long. Of course, you may have a self-selecting group here.
Posted by Dave | January 15, 2008 11:58 PM
Dave - the long tail is still extremely important!
However, we're seeing two simultaneous trends: the long tail is getting longer, but at the same time the 'head' is getting bigger. In other words, at the top end the big brands (and search terms) are gaining market share, but at the same time the tail of smaller sites and less popular search terms continues to increase.
Here is a blog post that explains it in a bit more detail: http://weblogs.hitwise.com/robin-goad/2007/12/long_tail_evolution.html
Thanks, Robin
Posted by Robin Goad | January 16, 2008 10:21 AM
To celebrate Facebook's success, I've created Facebook group dedicated ot the Hitwise UK blog. Hopefully it will become place for people to discuss the data and analysis contained in the blog, plus any other UK internet related topics!
Join here: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=24018201744
Thanks, Robin
Posted by Robin Goad | January 15, 2008 06:49 PM