Social media more popular than ever

by Robin Grant in News on 31 December 2008 at 09:12 Google+

An almost unbelievable couple of graphs from Robin Goad at Hitwise, the first showing that 10.09% of all UK internet visits last week were to ‘Social Networking and Forums’.

UK Social Media traffic Dec '07 - Dec '08

And the second showing Facebook’s inexorable growth.

UK Facebook traffic Dec '07 - Dec '08

There’s some more in depth data available in Hitwise’s UK Social Networking Update from July this year, and it’s worth remembering these sort of growth curves apply across social media, with this graph showing a similarly stratospheric rise in UK blog traffic.

UK blog traffic May '05 - Jun '08

As Robin Goad said at the time:

over the last 3 years UK Internet traffic to out Blogs and Personal Websites category has increased by 208%, compared to 70% for News and Media. Another interesting fact is that the market share of blogs is greater in the UK than the USA: 1.09% and 0.73% respectively in May.

The trend also seems to apply even to Twitter

UK Twitter traffic Jul '07 - Jul '08

Again, a nice quote from Robin Goad:

UK Internet visits to Twitter have increased by 631% over the last 12 months, with 485% of that growth coming this year. Twitter is more popular with Brits than Americans: last week the site’s share of UK Internet visits was 70% higher its share of visits in America. Twitter cannot yet be considered mainstream in the USA, but in the UK it’s getting there.

I’d also point out that the Twitter data above pre-dates the Stephen Fry effect (disclosure: Stephen is a client of ours and we helped get him going on Twitter).

Roll on 2009…

Update 21st Jan ’09 – The latest UK Twitter stats.

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  • s

    yea awesome dude… lol hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

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  • wiliam143

    Facebook growing is no surprise. In fact it would be a surprise if Facebook did not grow. It is quite simple, Facebook has had the most money invested, literally poured, into it, at 500 million USD. This immense, and some amy say ridiculous amount of capital can be aggressively spent on PR and marketing schemas to acquire users.

    Twitter also has now secured 55 million total USD in financing, and this too will be poured into PR and user acquisition efforts.

    So really growth is just an effect of how much money you can spend to pay newspapers, press, bloggers and other communication channels to write about your service.

    The internet is far removed from the days when technical innovation meant growth and success of web hosting, and is now just a reflection of the physical world, where marketing and PR dollars are a must in order to build a brand. In numbers Facebook has 175 million users and has almost burned through 500 million USD (i.e. they have paid almost 3 USD a user).

    MySpace, for all its flaws, is making good revenue in comparison to their total funding, which I believe was only like 20 million USD, before News Corp acquired the service.

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