At a time when all marketing eyes are either watching the move by the search engines into traditional advertising space or experimenting with social networks comes the latest figures on the later’s performance. It appears that not just the Labour party’s hopeful Deputy Leaders are using this channel.
According to a Hitwise report, MySpace still accounts for roughly 79% of social networking traffic. However, since the September 2006, Facebook has experienced a traffic increase of 106%! We must however note that they opened up their collegiate service in this time to all Internet users, so the increase may just be a blip.
Year over year growth is signioficant with Facebook 126% traffic increase and Bebo.com 184%. Again these figures look astounding but must be viewed in terms of their positions as relative new startups. The I nteresting insight is that MySpace accounts for roughly 24% of the traffic that hits sites such as Bebo, Facebook and Imeem. So social networkers are not satisfied with using only one platform and users appear to join all the new spaces as a way to meet even more people.
The message to online marketers is that the sector is growing and that there appears to be a clear need for users to maximise their reach to their ‘friends’. It will be interestingtoi see if this is that same with respect to other growing site Second Life.
