MH1 Web Design Blog

by Brenna Ehrlich on www.mashable.com

Despite Facebook privacy changes and serious cases of Twitter Fail Whale, social media use has increased astronomically since this time last year: During December 2009, global users spent an average of five hours on social networking sites, up from three hours in December 2008. That’s an 82% increase.

Nielsen just released a report on its blog detailing increased social media use, and the results are impressive, while not exactly shocking. Some highlights:

- Social networking sites are the most popular online destinations globally (based on the amount of time people spent there in December), with games and instant messaging coming in second and third, respectively. (Side note: As gaming becomes more popular on sites like Facebook, it will be interesting to see how this affects time spent.)

- In December, Facebook was the most popular social networking site globally, with 67% of social media fans logging in. In addition, time spent on Facebook has been on the rise; globally, people spend close to six hours per month on the network.

- In the U.S., people continue to spend more time on social networks, but year-over-year growth for Facebook and Twitter individually outpaced overall growth for the category at large.

- Twitter was the fastest-growing social networking site in December 2009, during which it had 18.1 million unique visitors. That’s up from 2.7 million unique visitors in December 2008. Still, month-over-month, unique visitors decreased 5%, lending credence to the notion that the microblogging site’s popularity may be flatlining.

Here are some charts from Nielsen showing social media’s ascent:

So what does all this mean? Basically what we and a bevy of social media experts have been saying for months now: Social networking is a force to reckoned with.

Sites like Facebook and Twitter are getting the most eyeballs, which means we have to figure out how to use them to their maximum potential — whether it be by optimizing ROI or attempting to mine them for journalistic purposes.

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