Facebook, turning five years old recently, has now become the most popular social networking site in the world.
Ranked by number of total visits, Facebook has now over a billion visits a month. By comparison, MySpace has 810 million visits. The positions reversed from a year ago, when MySpace was the most popular site and Facebook was number two. Over the last 12 months Facebook has steadily grown in the number of visits per unique visitor and time spent on the site. MySpace has tailed off, especially in the latter metric. Last summer -08 presented a significant drop for MySpace, when the average time spent the site fell from 20 minutes to about 11 minutes.
What about Twitter then? As you might remember Facebook offered $500.000.000 for Twitter but they turned it down (see post). This hugely popular microblogging service has still a long way to go if they want to catch the two giants of social networking. Twitter had 6.6 million unique visitors and 54 million total visits in January -09. However, Twitter experienced a huge lift in popularity in 2008, shooting from the 22nd place to third. No wonder, since even Barack Obama, Kevin Rudd and Britney Spears are currently Twitter users. The average stay on Twitter now equals MySpace, which is amazing since all we are talking about is a little box where you can write a message of no more than 140 characters.
Here is the current Top 10 of the most popular Social Networking websites:
- Facebook.com
- MySpace.com
- Twitter.com
- Flixter.com
- LinkedIn.com
- Tagged.com
- Classmates.com
- MyYearBook.com
- MyJournal.com
- Imeem.com
So, if you want to be seen, heard or found on the Internet today, log yourself on to these websites asap.
Kris Olin, MSc (Econ.) * Editor in Chief at Social Media Revolver * Web Designer * SEO Specialist * Author of the Facebook Advertising Guide. Follow Kris on Twitter and LinkedIn. See his photos at Flickr.