When marketing online it is essential to know online trends and the whereabouts of your demographic. The top three players in social media today are Facebook.com, MySpace.com and Twitter.com. The following is is some research that I have found comparing usage between all three. Some interesting trends are shown here.

Below is a graph that depicts Unique Visitors to all three of the mentioned social sites.

These Unique Visitors statistics can show us the health of each social networking site. For example we can see the trend that Facebook’s Unique Visitor trend has been increasing for the past year taking a huge jump starting Feb 09. This indicates that new users have been flocking to the site to sign up. This also indicates that the future of Facebook is a prosperous one and this should be noted by every marketer out there.

Facebook has had a 248.17% increase in Unique Visitors in the past year, whereas MySpace has suffered a -5.65% decrease – indicating that MySpace’s new user sign-up is declining.

Twitter – why so low?

It’s true that Twitter may look to be a small player in comparison, however in the past year Twitter’s Unique Visitors have increased by 1164.11%

Now that we have looked at the Unique Visitors it is time to look at Visits and by contrasting the Unique Visitors we will be able to determine how often users return to the social networking site and how engaged they are in the social networking experience.

Our previous findings from looking at the Unique Visitors chart further my reasoning that MySpace is slowly dying. Although this chart does not show time spent on each site it does indicate that the number of times users return to the site. This shows us how engaged the user-base is with the site and how satisfied they are with the service provided. The marketing implications are simple, more potential customers are returning to Facebook during the day/week than any other social networking site. Twitter’s stats here could be proving that many users are using Twitter clients such as TweetDeck.

Total Users & Average Visits Per User

I have compiled information regarding total users for each site, all information is taken from this year and will give an accurate estimate of the average visits each user visits the site per week.

Facebook

• Users: 250,000,000 +
• Current Visits per Month: 1,898,910,472
• Average Visits per User per Month: 7.60
• Average Visits per User per Week: 1.90

From this we can see that the average Facebook visit per week by each user is 1.90. Of course some users are dormant and others are addicted, this is obviously the case with each site. However this is a good standard for comparison.

MySpace

• Users: 245,300,000 +
• Current Visits per Month: 766,097,151
• Average Visits per User per Month: 3.12
• Average Visits per User per Week: .78

Twitter

• Users: 4,819,242 (public users)
• Current Visits per Month: 150,752,603
• Average Visits per User per Month: 31.28
• Average Visits per User per Week: 7.82

Marketing Implications

Twitters user-base is loyal (412% more loyal than Facebook), yet the demographic is much narrower compared to Facebook and MySpace. Twitter’s future looks bright, however current marketing strategies for Twitter may prove worthless depending upon your demographic. For example read Mashable’s “Stats Confirm It: Teens Don’t Tweet” post. Currently MySpace is still a major player, and they do boast longer averages of user engagement with their site (study not conducted in this post) however the longevity of the service is under threat by a trend of fewer new-user-sign-ups. Facebook is the closest tool for a catch-all marketing campaign, however if your market is in the 25+ yr old demographic and are users of Twitter… lucky you!

Your Comments Please

Have you found this interesting? Something I’ve missed? Let me know!

About the Author:  Rob Johnson is a freelance web developer who has a passion for online marketing. He is an Addy Award winner and currently teaches a New Media Strategies class at BYU-Idaho.