Social Media By The Numbers

A number of new reports have been released with some interesting numbers regarding various social networks and social media platforms. I thought it might be helpful to aggregate a bunch of them here and link to the blogs and sites that reported on them so you can get more in-depth info about each of them.

Note: I’m not offering a lot of interpretation on these, so be wary. Numbers can be used to say a lot of things, especially when taken individually and out of context. I suggest reading the actual studies in order to make your own assessment of what they mean. Additionally, you may notice that some of the numbers offered are contradictory.  Much of that is due to data coming from a variety of studies. Also, some of the data is specific to U.S. users while other data looks at the worldwide picture.

• Facebook saw an increase of over 3-million unique visitors in the U.S. during September, up to 95.5 million, while Twitter grew by about 100-thousand unique U.S. visitors to 20.9 million. (Note: The Twitter number only includes those who use the Twitter website, not those using third-party apps.) – Techcrunch

• According to Compete.com, Twitter traffic down 0.17% in September. Facebook up 1.93%. MySpace down 9.66%. FriendFeed down 28.41%. LinkedIn up 5.68%. – Twittercism and Inside Facebook

• Those same numbers show MySpace’s losses, both in users and financially, are accelerating. – Mashable

• According to Nielsen, Facebook had 23-million unique U.S. video views last month, ranking it third behind YouTube and Yahoo. – Inside Facebook

• According to Hitwise, Facebook’s market share of the social network pie is up 194% over the past year, while MySpace’s share dropped 55%. Twitter’s share grew by a hefty 1170%.  Facebook also saw a large increase in the amount of time users spent on the site, while both Twitter and MySpace saw decreases – WebProNews,  Inside Facebook, and All Facebook

• YouTube has reached the 1-billion views per day landmark. – Mashable

• Flickr now hosts over 4-billion photos. – Mashable

• More than half of employers block all access to social networks – Mashable

So what do we do with all these numbers? My quick take:

• Overall, social media is healthy and isn’t going away anytime soon. Pretty sure it’s not “just a fad.”

• Facebook is clearly the front-runner, while the numbers bear watching. The folks at Facebook seem to be doing a lot of tweaking and adding of features. This is important, especially if they are listening to their users.

• MySpace is in trouble. Anecdotally I’m finding that more and more people I talk to are logging in less frequently, and some are even abandoning the network altogether. The one strong point is the music sector. MySpace should probably continue to focus on strengthening it’s music segment and carve out a strong niche for itself.

• Twitter is doing well. I think the plateauing numbers are a bit deceptive, as more and more people are opting to use third party apps, rather than the actual website. This includes those tweeting from their cellphones. Like all social networks, Twitter has a lot of accounts that were created by people who decided not to stick around. I think we will begin to see less of this in the future.

• I think businesses need to stop being afraid of social networking sites and allow their employees to use them, at least in a somewhat controlled setting. Happy employees can often be a businesses best evangelists. It would be interesting to see how all the above numbers would change if employees were allowed more workplace access.

• Video usage is clearly still an important element of social media. I would expect this to continue to rise, especially as businesses see the value of including videos in their social media marketing plans.

What’s your take?

Tagged as: facebook, MySpace, Social Media, social networking, Twitter