August 07, 2007 | Tuesday

The Social Boom

By Jon Myers, Director Of Search in Marketing |News |Search Engines |Search Research

In the last 12 months we have seen a dramatic growth in all things Social on the Internet to the point of total visitors climbing by as much as 774%

A new study conducted by comScore, reviewed MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, Orkut, Bebo and Tagged and they looked at the number of unique visitors and average daily visitors to the five sites, comparing June 2007 statistics to the last set from June 2006.

The study commented that the growth means social sites are now a big sector of the Internet and should not be considered as just a passing trend. They are now a very viable and volume driving section for online marketers to take firm advantage of.

Lets have a look at the numbers that comScore came back with in the study. Tagged.com was the fastest-growing site of those it studied with a 774% growth; MySpace was still top of the table, according to the report. MySpace had more than 114 million unique visitors this June, a 72% increase over the 66 million visits of June 2006.

Coming in second-place was Facebook, with about 52 million unique visitors this summer, but for me this will accelerate further and faster as it has only been in the last 10 weeks that we seem to have seen a sudden Facebook explosion in users. Next years numbers will be telling here I think.

This is echoed in the comScore study by the growth in the last year being 270%, according to comScore. Which if this was to continue at that rate Facebook will have 192 million users by June 2008 with MySpace at 196 million if they have 72% growth again.

The focus of the study was quite North American but it is the general trend right across the globe with the big two. Bebo does hold a strong footing in Europe with about 63% of all its traffic from the region. With Latin America and Asia driven by Orkut and Friendster getting 89% of all its traffic from Asia-Pacific region.

All in all Social is here to stay so as marketers we need to embrace the opportunity and use it more and more in the coming years.