BUZZ NEWS

Global Social Media Time Rises 82 Percent YOY

Posted on January 27, 2010
Angela Natividad

New metrics from Nielsen reveal that users spent 5.5 hours on socnets like Facebook and Twitter in December ’09, representing an 82% rise from the roughly 3 hours spent in December ’08.

Facebook is by far the No. 1 social networking destination, enjoying 206.9 million unique visits in December — that’s 67% of social media users in the world.* On-site time is also impressive (unless you manage an office full of Facebook users, in which case it’s depressing): the average user anywhere on the globe spends almost six hours per month on the site, probably stalking exes or lurking over the baby photos of others.

(*Illustrative shiver*)

By average time spent, social networks and blogs are the most popular online category, followed by online games and instant messaging. Average time spent per person on the former increased 143% year-over-year as of December. In terms of overall growth for the category, Facebook and Twitter outpaced all, rising 200% and 368%, respectively.

In the US Twitter remains the fastest-growing socnet in terms of unique visitors — a 579% year-over-year increase, from 2.7 million uniques in December ’08 to 18.1 million in ’09. Month-over-month, however, unique visitors deflated 5%.

The US continues to lead other countries in terms of social media and blog use, charting 142.1 million unique visitors with an average time spent of 6 hours per month. It’s followed, not so closely, by Japan, whose unique visitors totaled 46.6 million for December with an average time spent of nearly three hours per month.

While their user numbers are smaller, the UK, Italy and Australia all sport average times spent of between 6 and 7 hours, with Australia totaling the most: 6 hours and 52 minutes.

France is somewhat middling. France-based social media and blog users totaled 26.8 million at year’s end, with an average time spent of four hours and four minutes per month.

What’s all this mean? We’re not entirely sure, but we know what we’ll see: more earnest efforts by marketers to penetrate Facebook and Twitter, with the usual mixed results and the occasional gem. If you can’t be strategic, or if these sites simply don’t fit into your existing strategy, no worries, guys; there’ll be fresh ground to stake next year.

(And hey, there’s always mobile. Remember mobile? ...yeah.)

— -

*Note that for the purposes of this study, "global data" only accounts for the US, UK, Australia, Brazil, Japan, Switzerland, Germany, France, Spain and Italy.