The buyers Specific Media scooped up the website for a mere $35 million (approx £22m), a snip for the once dominant social network? Well that will be proven in the coming months. However, if Bebo is anything to go by, the purchasing of once popular social networks could prove to be a poor decision. Bebo sold for whopping $850m to AOL at its peak in March 2008 but sold a year ago for a measly $10m.

It appears that CEO Mike Jones will be leaving the company along with a large number of the current staff, some reports indicating up to 50% of the team could lose their jobs.

“In conjunction with the deal, we are conducting a series of restructuring initiatives, including a significant reduction in our workforce. I will assist Specific with the transition over the next two months before departing my role as MySpace CEO.”

A more interesting rumour is that Justin Timberlake is to take the ownership stake in Myspace as the new owners concentrate on giving the website a core music focus.

Source: Mashable

A recent study has shown that traffic resultant from sharing now accounts for about 10% of all internet traffic (that’s huge!) and 31% of all referral traffic to sites from search & social platforms.

So where is all this traffic coming from, where are people sharing? Well, as you probably predicted, Facebook leads the way. With a whopping 38% of all share traffic coming from this site alone, Facebook has yet another title to add to it’s many record breaking achievements. Well, with over 500 million users on a site that is basically dedicated to sharing, it’s not really surprising.  The next biggest sharing contender is Email, generating 17% of share traffic, followed by Twitter at 11%, giving us three major players in the sharing world.

These figures have come from shared content that is actually clicked on. If you look at just how much content was shared but not necessarily clicked on by the person it was shared with, Facebook is accountable for 56%.

So, if you want to spread the word, Facebook’s the place to be. But what about if you need some interaction with the content once it’s shared? In terms of shared links, it appears Twitter users click through more than users of other platforms. The average Twitter link is clicked 4.8 times, compared to 4.3 for Facebook and 1.7 for email.

The lesson here is that sharing is a big deal. It’s now forming a huge part of our online experience and if you’re not taking full advantage of it, you’ll definitely want to do something about it. Social network users, blog readers & email recipients are sharing things themselves, you’ve just got to start it off.

Here at Clicky Media we offer a number of solutions to help you take full advantage of these sharing trends. We offer social media management, blog creation, email marketing & many more avenues into the online sharing world. Call us today to discuss the best option for you, or alternatively, get in touch via the website, just click here >>

Source: TechCrunch.com, ShareThis

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.

Brands and social media (Cone)

78% of social media users interact with companies or brands via new media sites and tools, an increase of 32% from 2008.
95% of new media users also believe companies or brands should not only have social media presence, while 89% believe that they should interact with their consumers in this space.

Social network UK market share (Experian Hitwise)

Twitter now receives more web traffic than MySpace in the UK, picking up 1 in every 400 UK internet visits in August, ranking as the 27th most visited website in the UK, one position above MySpace.
Twitter claimed 2.21% of UK visits to social networks, though since this only measures direct visits to the Twitter website and not the various Twitter clients, it may underestimate the real numbers.
Facebook was number one, with 47.5%, followed by YouTube on 16.63%, and Bebo on 4.26%.

Social media and customer experience (Tealeaf via Econsultancy)

Customers who experience problems when shopping online are talking about it on social media sites; 13% this year compared with 8% in 2008.
51% of respondents saying that social media has influenced their online transactions. 75% said their choice of retailer was influenced by what they read on social media sites, while 56% avoided a particular company after reading a bad review.

Advertising on social networks (comScore)

Social networks accounted for 13.8bn display ad impressions in August 2009, which is more than 25% of all display ads viewed online.
The telecommunications, retail and banking sectors were the biggest advertisers on social networks, in that order.

The recent social media stats were taken from a range of sources, including Econsultancy’s Social Media Statistics document, which forms part of the Internet Statistics Compendium, and other reports.

Source: Econsultancy

A recent report from Experian Hitwise revealed some very interesting UK Social Networking statistics. By no means is it breaking news that Facebook is by far the most popular social networking site in the UK, but the report does indicate how huge Facebook’s growth has been over the past couple of years.

According to the report, Facebook now accounts for 1 in every 7 Internet page views in the UK, that’s 14.5% of all UK page views! We recently revealed that UK user figures for Facebook had surpassed the 20 million milestone – an increase the report suggests of 86.1% over the last year. The data in the report was taken for September 2009.

Although Facebook is the second most visited site in the UK, sitting just behind Google, Facebook is ranked first place in terms of pages per UK visitor. In fact, in terms of page views in September 2009 Facebook received more than Google UK, Ebay UK and YouTube combined.

Below is a graph of the top 10 Social Networking sites ranked by internet visits in September 2009:

As well as leading in terms of page views, Facebook has also seen huge year on year growths. Furthermore, Facebook has achieved an even greater feat – increasing year on year average time spent on site by users. Please see the graph below:

Sources: Experian Hitwise

Social Networks continue to dominate online activity and usage across the globe and this is no more evident than here in the UK. A recent report from ComScore reveals some very interesting UK Social Media Stats.

Of the 36.9 million UK internet users in May 2009, 29.4 million visited at least one social networking website.

It is now clear that Social networking has now become very much a mainstream activity for UK internet users of all ages. In fact, 80% of all the UK’s online population visited a social networking site in May 2009, a nine percent growth across the board in a year. The highest level of penetration was with the age group of 25-34 year olds of which 90% visted a social networking site over the month period.

Interesting, this was higher than in the 15-24 year old range – the demographic usually presumed to have the highest user figures. Of this group of teens and early twenty-somethings 86% of internet users visted a social networking website.

Although usage amongst older age ranges is much lower than in 15-34 year olds, penetration was still very high – reaching over three quarters of people aged 35-54 and over two thirds of the UK online population aged over 55. When put into perspective this is extremely impressive particularly in comparison with other website categories visited by this demographic such as business & finance (63%), technology (62%t) or travel site (52%)

User engagement was also greater amongst the younger age groups, with monthly usage averaging 5.4 hours for 15 – 34 year olds. This was much lower than in the over 55 age range whom spent an average of 3.7 hours per month on social networking websites.

Overall, the average UK internet user spent 4.6 hours on Social Networking sites over the one month period.

Facebook has long been the UK’s most popular Social Networking site and now has over 19 million active users. In May 2009 alone Facebook.com received 23.9 million visitors in the UK. Other popular social networking sites continued to struggle to keep up with Facebook – Bebo followed as the second most visited UK Social Network (8.5 million visitors), then Windows Live Profile (6.9 million visitors) and MySpace Sites (6.5 million visitors). Even though Twitter has grown 3000% over the last 12 months the sites visitor numbers only reached 2.7 million in May 2009.

Source: ComScore

LATEST SOCIAL MEDIA STATS – DECEMBER 2009 >>

For more information on Facebook user statistics please see previous blog posts from August 2009, July 2009 and June 2009.

At Clicky Media we provide a wide range Social Media Marketing services, visit our social media services page to find out more or email us: info@clickymedia.co.uk.

Well, a recent report undertaken by AddtoAny certainly suggests so. According to the study, the volume of information generated and shared across the web using Facebook has grown massively over the past 12 months.

In particular, the report shows that Facebook now accounts for 24% of all online item sharing, this is in contrast to email which apparently only accounts for a mere 11.1%. Unsuprisingly, Twitter features heavily in the report, accounting for 10.8% of all items shared. Other popular portals for information sharing across the internet include other popualr social networking sites, blogs and social bookmarking sites.

As Facebook continues to grow and grow around the world it seems as though it is steadily drawing users away from more traditional forms of online communication as users continue to share more information among peers through the social network.

With this in mind, is it about time Facebook improved its inbox facility to take full advantage of this?

Source: AllFacebook

Facebook and other social networking sites are being credited for the huge growth in mobile internet usage over the past 18 months in the UK.

More and more frequently mobile handsets are prefitted with default settings for Facebook, the UK’s most popular Social Network. The popularity of Facebook for mobile is such that 3 launched the INQ1, dubbed by many as ‘The Facebook Phone’. In addition, the huge increase of ‘smart phones’ in the market such as the iPhone have also contributed to the rise of mobile internet usage.

A recent report conducted by CSS Insight confirmed that access to social networking sites was driving the usage and average time spent up of mobile internet services.

The report indicated that up to a third of young people (16 – 35 year olds) regularly access Facebook and Twitter on their mobile. By far the most popular in terms of usage is Facebook, which is used more often than Twitter and Bebo combined.

CCS Insight also predict that 44% of mobile users will access the internet via their handset by the end of 2009. Other recent predictions from Juniper also suggest that mobile application downloads will reach almost 20 billion by 2014.

Another study earlier this year by Lightspeed research for the Internet Advertising Bureau found that in the UK, 25% of social media site users were updating their profiles and pages through their mobile phones.

Source: BBC

AOL has announced the completion of its $850,000,000 (£435 million) acquisition of Bebo, a social network based in the UK. Bebo has an estimated 40 million users worldwide.

Randy Falco, Chairman and CEO of AOL, said about the deal, “AOL is now fully focused on growing our business in three key areas – our advertising network, publishing and people networks – by delivering relevant content and advertising across the Web, and we’re making great progress in each area.”

But will the acquisition threaten another deal with Yahoo UK who last year inked an ad deal with Bebo for the social network’s display advertising.

Source : SEW