Legal Marketing & PR

Social Networks Now More Popular than Email

By Larry Bodine, Esq.

From the LawMarketing Portal:

Two-thirds of the world's Internet population visit social networking or blogging sites, accounting for almost 10% of all internet time, reports public relations expert Brian Solis. What's more, Facebook has surpassed MySpace!

You heard that right...no matter how much time we sink into our inbox trying to keep up with all that barrage of never-ending mail, a new report by The Nielsen Company reports that Social networks and blogs are now the fourth most popular online activity today.

The report, "Global Faces and Networked Places," features data captured from December 2007 through December 2008 and reveals some very interesting statistics worth noting.

Here are the highlights:

• Two-thirds of the world's Internet population visit social networking or blogging sites, accounting for almost 10% of all internet time.
• Time spent on social network sites is also expanding. Across the globe in 2008 activity in "Member Communities" accounted for one in every 15 online minutes -- and now it accounts for one in every 11.
• While social networks started out among the younger audience, they've become more mainstream with the passage of time.
• This shift has primarily been driven by Facebook whose greatest growth has come from people aged 35-49 years of age (+24.1 million). From December 2007 through December 2008, Facebook added almost twice as many 50-64 year old visitors (+13.6 million) than it has added under 18 year old visitors (+7.3 million).

For the rest of the report, visit the LawMarketing Portal at http://www.lawmarketing.com/pages/articles.asp?Action=Article&ArticleCategoryID=13&ArticleID=870

Full post as published by Larry Bodine's LawMarketing Blog on April 02, 2009 (boomark / email).