I attended a Facebook session last week which went into the updates of the social networking organisation. Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more connected. It certainly has achieved this since its launch in February 2004. I learnt a lot at the session and wanted to share some of the stats with you.
Facebook cupcake
Key Facebook Facts
There are 30 million active users of Facebook in the UK (not including those under 13 years)
Each person has an average of 218 friends
20 million people use Facebook daily
There is a 50/50 split between male and female users
Quickest growing demographic are those over 35 years old
13- 24 year old are the most active
There are more than 3 billion stories posted each month.
Read more »
Last month, Google launched Google+ which is pretty much their attempt to jump onto the social media bandwagon. Before we jump into the stats from Hitwise, lets have a quick recap of What is Google+?
Google vs Facebook
(source: thenextweb.com/google/2010/11/10/google-vs-facebook)
Google+ brings all your contacts in one place, and lets you organise them into different groups. You can have a group for your work friends, school friends and so on. Google+ is made of five key areas:
* Circles — your friends hub. Instead of grouping everyone together as your “friend,” you can create different circles for the different types of people in your life like colleagues, relatives, tennis partners. It is very easy to make new groups and add contacts – drag and drop.
* Hangouts — this is where you can send a broadcast to your friends that you are online and want to chat face to face. You have everyone “hanging out” together – only virtually though. It is like a massive three, four way skype chat.
* Sparks — Designate your interests in Sparks, and Google+ will collect articles, videos, and photos of the things you love from around the web to read when you’re free (like an RSS reader). You can share these items with specific circles of friends instead of all of your friends.
* Instant Upload — With Instant Upload, your mobile photos and videos are automatically uploaded to the web. (So no worrying about backing up your media, you can have it stored online in your own cloud)
* Huddle — A group messaging system, Huddle allows you to chat with a number of friends on the go via your mobile phone.
So do you think Google+ will take off? Only time will tell. Hitwise have come up with the following interesting stats, so it looks like people are using it. I doubt they will give up on Facebook, so the battle between to the two search giants will continue.
- Google+ received more than 1.79M total visits the week ending July 23, 2011. That is a decrease of 3% vs. the previous week (July 16th). The site received 1.86M total visits the previous week
- The average time spent on the site was down as well by 10% from 5minutes and 50seconds to 5minutes and 15seconds
- Among the top 50 Upstream sites, 59% of Upstream traffic to Google+ last week came from other Google properties. Google.com accounted for 37% of Upstream traffic to the site. Gmail accounted 15.59%, a 9% increase from previous week
- 40% of Upstream traffic to Google+ last week came from Search Engines (8% increase). Email provided the 2nd largest amount of Upstream traffic accounting for 19%.
- 59% of visits to Google+ are from Males.
- Among age demos, 33% of visits are from users age 25-34 for the 4 weeks ending July 23rd.
I have yet to really engage with Google+. At the beginning, only those with invitations could use Google+ but now everyone has an invite.
The future of the social networking sites is in niche online communities
These will be based on:
1. Interests or lifestyles eg diamondlounge.com
2. Solving problems or self help eg netmums.com
3. Business user needs to keep in touch with colleagues and contacts
People like the exclusiveness and the feeling they belong, they want to be part of these niche online communities. Normally it is the innovators and early adopters who are first to be part of these communities.
There are a lot of these small online networks. One of the most talked about is “SmallWorld” which was set up 2004. It is a private online community and is by invitation only. So if you know someone who has a smallworld membership, ask them to invite you, smallworld claim they are “the world’s leading private online community that captures an existing international network of people who are connected by three degrees of separation”. They argue that what makes the network unique and different to other social sites such as facebook is that the connections are authentic. People do not have loads and loads of friends who they never see or speak to in real life. Those trust and loyal ASW members who meet certain criteria can invite the limited number of their friends to their network. So if you want to be a invited, ask your friends or colleagues and if you are real nice, they might just send you an invite!!
If you are part of the elite networking scene, you may have heard of Diamond Lounge. Set up October 2007, it has a very selective membership process – more rigorous than that of any other online club. Prior to launch accepted only 100 members from 10,000 applications. It is an advertising free site and instead charge a monthly membership fee from £24.99 a month. The perk of Diamond Lounge is that it offers separate social and business rooms where members can build separate profiles. So you can meet your future business partner and life partner on the same site. Diamond Lounge also offers immediate communication options; live email, 4 party instant messaging and even video conferencing within the different online rooms.
So if you are looking for that special someone, check out Diamond Lounge.
There are over 160 social networking sites covering various countries and topics at the time of writing this blog.
Social networking sites can drive seo traffic to your site. People can share links talk about the site with their friends and family. They can also talk about your site on their own blogs.With twitter they can easily follow your site. What is social networking you might ask? Well it is is the grouping of individuals into specific groups. It is like having your own little community but on line.
Most people use these social networking sites to:
Communicate with people in their extended social network
Stay in touch with people they already know (support pre-existing relationships)
Research suggests that most SNSs primarily support pre-existing social relations
Facebook is used to maintain existing offline relationships or solidify offline connections
All have common offline element – eg went to school together
Not used to meet new people
Facebook users search for people with whom they have an offline connection
Don’t tend to browse to meet complete strangers
91% of U.S. teens who use SNSs do so to connect with friends
Social networks are growing in populartity and the social networking sites took over email in global reach at 68.4% in Feb 09. The reach is highest in Brazil (80%) but fastest growing in Germany (from 39% – 51% in one year). Facebook popular in UK and USA. According to facebook there are more than 30 million active users, not bad for a company that was originally set up for Harvard College students. However, Mixi is the leader in Japan, Orkut in Brazil, Stayfriends, Wer-kent-wen and StudiVZ top 3 social networking sites Germany. Twitter gaining popularity, grew 131% between Feb and March 09 to 9.3 million US users.
Social networking sites | Jo Turnbull | 
October 8, 2011 9:56 am | 
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