If your online behaviors are like others across the world, then you're spending a larger amount of time on social media sites. You are not alone as more and more users across the globe are spending time messaging, commenting, writing reviews, blogging, sharing, and “liking” things. How does your use of social media compare to others?
There is no denying the popularity of social media sites. According to Nielsen, three of the top ten Internet brands are social media sites - Facebook, YouTube, and Wikipedia. During April 2010, Nielsen statistics report that 22 percent of all time online was spent on social media sites. That represents a 66 percent increase since April 2009, with the average visitor spending almost six hours in April 2010 versus 3.5 hours last year.
The number of visitors is also growing rapidly. The number of social media users increased 24 percent from April 2009 to April 2010. These social networking sites are now visited by three quarters of Internet users across the world.
Facebook is the most popular social media brand with 54 percent of the world’s Internet population visiting the site in April 2010. Only Google and MSN/Windows Live/Bing had more visitors during April of this year.
In the United States, 64 percent of Internet users visited the Facebook site, with an average time of 6.75 hours on the site in April.
Facebook is rapidly becoming a video content site, because submitting and viewing video content is a significant part of the social media experience for Internet users. Each month, about 25 billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook. Nearly 20 million videos are uploaded each month by Facebook’s users and approximately 2 billion videos are watched each month, according to Facebook.
Facebook’s growth has been spurred by the use of smart phones. Last summer, Facebook allowed members to upload video by e-mailing a clip directly to the site by updating its iPhone app to allow people to record and share video directly from their phones. Since those changes, uploads of videos to Facebook have increased almost twofold.
Nearly 178 million viewers watched an average of 171 videos per viewer during the month of April for all video content sites.
In the strictly video content category, nothing rivals YouTube. During April 2010, 47 percent of the world’s Internet users visited YouTube and spent just under an hour at the site. On YouTube.com, 135.7 million viewers watched 13 billion videos which equals 96 videos per the average viewer (the average duration of an online video is 4.4 minutes).
The top video advertising networks in April were Joost Video Network by Adconion Media Group, BrightRoll Video Network and BBE. Based on their actual reach, Joost had a 36.6 percent penetration of viewers of online video, followed by BrightRoll with 19.5 percent and BBE with 18.5 percent.
The use of social media will continue to grow as smart phone penetration continues to expand. In the meantime, developers are taking advantage of the features of these phones to create even greater social networking experiences.
The hardest question for businesses is how they can become part of this growing social media phenomenon and integrate it into their marketing programs. Come back next week to read more on this topic...
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