Social media more popular than ever
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’.
And the second showing Facebook’s inexorable growth.
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.
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
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.