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Social media more popular than ever

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

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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  • Nice summary Robin.
  • Only good can come of this.
  • Thanks for quoting our data, Robin.

    Twitter has continued growing since we posted that data and last week accounted for 1 in every 10,000 UK Internet vsits. That may not sound very high, but its up from 1 in every 50,000 a year ago.

    We'll be posting some more detailed updated numbers next year, so keep an eye on blog for further updates.

    Robin Goad
    Research Director, Hitwise UK
  • Look forward to these, Robin. It would be interesting to see level of month on month growth by the end of Q1 2009. Given recent media attention from @wossy in the Mail to today's FT piece - Twitter will continue to gain momentum with mainstream audiences.
  • Time to rebrand hitwise? Longtailwise
  • lovely stuff. thx for flagging
  • fab stuff - thanks for sharing robin. the first graph is pretty staggering - 10% of traffic to social networking sites. Wow! That's a huge proportion.... and a nice figure for you guys to use in 2009 : ) All the best for the new year. Have a good one - hope to see you sometime soon....
  • Very cool stuff. Hadn't spotted - all exciting for 09!
  • Thanks for pointing this out Robin.

    So it tells us that we were all on holiday last week and socialising online?

    In all seriousness though the steady upward curve looks more interesting.
  • Great stats, Twitters growth in 2008 was amazing.
  • Glad to check out some stats. thanks for sharing.

    might you have the US versions of these??


    --
    http://twitter.com/franswaa
  • Tim
    Wowzers. These are great stats Robin! Will be interesting to see how the definition of a 'blog' and indeed 'social media' changes as they become increasingly 'mainstream'... won't all media be 'social' in a few years?!
  • Amazing growth for the U.K. Tying it with this eMarketer article, things are looking bright there http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1006830
  • social marketing has become a science that follows its own rules, that's why I've been studying the topic and applied the techniques and now I try to teach them on my blog.
  • joshua
    wow. that awesome. social media really is quite a phenomenon. thanks
  • 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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