The market research company Nielsen released last week The Social Media Report for the third quarter of 2011. The report shows that the social media status is continue its constant growing trend and its now stronger than ever. Let’s review its key findings:
Top Destinations Online
Social networks and blogs are the top destinations online that accountable for 22.5% for the time spent over the internet. This is incredibly impressive when discovering that the second category, online games, has only 9.8%- Less than half from web 2.0 sites!
Search is accountable for only 4%, but it is pretty understandable because internet users don’t spend most of their time on search engines, they spend most of their times on sites referred BY search engines- For example, Google alone is responsible for more than quarter of Facebook’s traffic.
Most Active Social Networkers
The social networking ratio between male and females is pretty much equally divided- 52% are females while 48% are males. The largest age group are 18-34 years of age with 22.1% and a little behind is the age group of people between 35-49 years of age.
Surprisingly enough, the smallest age group is 2-17 years of age with about 18%. But all in all, we can see that social networking among different age groups became more similar with very small spreading.
How Consumers Access The Social Media
While PCs are still the most dominant device to access the social media with 97%, mobile phones gains great momentum and 37% of consumers are using them for social networking. Except from iPads (3%) the report didn’t mentioned other tablets, so it is pretty safe to assume that that the total number of mobile users (phones+tablets) that access the social media is much higher.
Spending Time On Web Brands
The top web brand by total minutes spending is Facebook with 53.5 billion, more than triple than the second in line, Yahoo with 17.2 billion. However, the report distinguish between Google (12.5 billion) and YouTube (9.1 billion) which together have more than Yahoo with total minutes of 21.6 billion combined.
Top Mobile Social Networking Sites
Facebook is the most popular social network through mobile devices by unique users, four times more than Twitter and almost 8 times more than LinkedIn.
Tumblr Almost Tripled Its Audience
The report mentioned Tumblr as a fast growing social networking site with a 183% unique visitors growth in a year. This reinforce similar findings from prior report that shows this growth rate for Tumblr.
You can read here the full social media report.