Interesting new numbers out today supporting my repeated beliefs that the social networking space is Facebook’s to lose. Consolidation toward more robust, simple and widely-adopted platforms stand to obsolete the more niche-based tools and venues. The mass behind Facebook — crossing most demographic and geographic boundaries — makes it an undeniable force.
Facebook’s share of U.S. traffic to social sites has grown nearly fourfold in the last year, to 58.6% from 19.9% as of September. Heading in the opposite direction is MySpace, which has seen its share tumble to 30.3% from 66.8%, a 55% plunge. With a 1.84% share of traffic, Twitter — the category’s hottest property — is only a drop in the bucket compared to its larger rivals. – Hitwise via Online Media Daily
Interesting, too, is the fact that average time spent on Facebook daily went up 23% last year to 23 minutes. MySpace still leads that metric with almost 26 minutes per average daily use, even though that number is down 12%. Time spent on Twitter showed a downward pattern for the service, as that figure fell 55% from 36:27 to 15:52. It’s a pretty significant decline for Twitter, but I wonder if the proliferation of third-party, off-site tools like TweetDeck figure in.
2010 should be interesting. With the economy still sputtering, you wonder if some we’ll see clear winners and losers emerge next year. More acquisitions and repositioning will likely occur. For now, I’d continue to favor Facebook.
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