16 October 2009

Facebook top UK social networking site

Social networking website Facebook has been ranked as the second most visited in the UK after Google.

Facebook is also the UK's top social networking website, despite the hype surrounding Twitter.

Facebook accounts for one in every seven pages viewed by UK internet users or 14.5% of all internet page views, according to online research company Hitwise.

UK internet visits to Facebook increased by 86.1% in the year to September and have more than doubled over the last 14 months.

During September, Facebook accounted for almost half (49.2%) of all UK internet visits to a social networking website.

Hitwise research director Robin Goad said: "During September Facebook was the second most visited website in the UK after Google UK (www.google.co.uk), but because users view a much larger number of pages per visit, Facebook is the clear leader in terms of page views.

"During September, Facebook received more page views than Google UK, eBay UK (www.ebay.co.uk) and YouTube (www.youtube.com) combined.

"Although it has fallen somewhat off the media radar in favour of Twitter recently, Facebook remains far and away the most popular social networking website in the UK.

"One significant factor is that the site's growth in the UK doesn't yet show any signs of slowing.

"A key measure of success for any social network is average session time; as we have seen with sites such as Friends Reunited and MySpace, when average session times begins to drop off visitor numbers soon follow.

"Facebook has yet to experience this problem: Hitwise monitoring data shows that its average visit time increased from 19 minutes 59 seconds in September 2008 to 26 minutes 14 seconds during September 2009."

by Phil Davies

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Your Comments (1)

I agree but does this mean we can all stop tweeting?

Is it just me or is online social networking taking over your life too? It certainly has its benefits and I'm certainly not going to stop just in case it is really effective - in fact I've just launched a new facebook group for ACE - The Association of Cruise Experts. I do sometimes feel like I'm knocking on the door at a party where there are so many people inside nobody can hear me though... prove me wrong and join the group!

By Flo Powell, Saturday, October 17, 2009