Social Media Statistics February 2010 now available >>

Here is a round up of all things social media for December 2009, with some interesting stats and data.

Overall usage of social networking sites continues to grow rapidly, with Facebook, the UK’s most used social networking site recently revealing that they have surpassed the 350 million worldwide user milestone. Facebook have achieved an additional 100 million users in under 5 months (250m in July). Here in the UK, Facebook now has over 23 million users.

Below are some graphs depicting the rise of Facebook in the UK over the past couple of years and the demise of their once great competitors MySpace and Bebo:

But Facebook isn’t the only Social Media site that is increasing in popularity in the UK. The launch of Twitter and it’s huge increase in usage over the past 12 months has given Facebook something to think about. LinkedIn, the business social networking site also continues to steadily grow.

Econsultancy also recently compiled a great list of interesting Social Media Stats:

• Social networks and blogs are the 4th most popular online activities online, including beating personal email. 67% of global users visit member communities and 10% of all time spent on the internet is on social media sites.

• If Facebook were a country, it would be the third most populated place in the world.

• 80% of companies use, (or are planning to use), LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees during the course of this year. The site has just celebrated reaching its 45-millionth membership.

• It took radio 38 years to reach 50 million listeners. Terrestrial TV took 13 years to reach 50 million users. The internet took four years to reach 50 million people… In less than nine months, Facebook added 100 million users.

• Wikipedia currently has more than 13 million articles in more than 260 different languages. The site attracts over 60 million unique users a month and it’s often hotly debated that the information it contains is more reliable than any printed Encyclopaedia.

• The most recent figure of blogs being indexed by Technorati currently stands at 133 million. The same report into the Blogosphere also revealed that on average, 900,000 blog posts are created within a single 24-hour period.

• It’s been suggested that YouTube is likely to serve over 75 billion video streams to around 375 million unique visitors during this year.

• The top three people on Twitter (Ashton Kutcher, Ellen DeGeneres and Britney Spears) have more combined followers than the entire population of Austria.*

• According to Socialnomics, if you were paid $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia, you would earn $156.23 per hour.

• The online bookmarking service, Delicious, has more than five million users and over 150 million unique bookmarked URLs.

• Since April this year, Twitter has been receiving around 20 million unique visitors to the site each month, according to some analytical sources.

• Formed in 2004, Flickr now hosts more than 3.6 billion user images.

• Universal McCann reports that 77% of all active internet users regularly read blogs.

See our latest Facebook Statistics blog article here:

• Facebook Statistics December 2009 >>

Sources: Econsultancy, Google Trends, Facebook.