With the release of The Social Network this week, retelling the story of Facebook, Experian Hitwise looks at just how popular the world’s biggest social networking site really is.
1. Facebook is the second most visited website in the UK after Google, accounting for 6.89% of all visits from UK Internet users in September.
2. In terms of internet pages viewed, Facebook is by far the biggest website in the UK. In total, 16.40% of all page views during September went to a Facebook page. Facebook now accounts for 1 in 6 page views in the UK, that’s twice the number of page views received by Google.
3. Facebook is the most popular social network in the UK, accounting for 55% of all visits to social networks. The nearest competitor is YouTube, which receives 16% of all visits to the category. Facebook is nearly 3.5 times bigger than YouTube in terms of monthly Internet visits in the UK.
4. Facebook is the number one search term in the UK. 3.69% of all searches typed into Google, Yahoo! and Bing are for ‘facebook’. Taking into account variations of Facebook with misspellings and abbreviations such as ‘facbook’, ‘fb’ or ‘facebok’ – Facebook accounts for approximately 6% of all searches in search engines.
5. The average session time for a user visiting Facebook is 27 minutes and 12 seconds.
6. Facebook accounts for 9.58% of all upstream traffic to other websites in the UK. In other words, Facebook is the second biggest source of traffic to all other websites, with nearly 10% of Internet visits come immediately after a visit to Facebook, making it the second largest source of traffic for other websites after Google.
7. Visits to Facebook have quadrupled in the last three years. In the last year Facebook has grown by 17% in terms of UK Internet visits.
8. Per head of population, the most prolific visitors to Facebook in the UK are in Sunderland. Sunderland accounts for 0.44% of all UK Internet visits to Facebook despite only having a population of 443,000 people (0.72% of the UK population).
9. In the last year, Facebook has increased its downstream traffic to online retail sites by 12%. Facebook is increasingly being used by companies as a means of advertising rather than a means for friends to talk to one another.
10. The Social Network was the second most searched for movie of the week ending 09 October 2010 behind Paranormal Activity 2. The Social Network was also the second fastest climbing movie search term compared to the previous week ending 02 October 2010.
Source: www.hitwise.com
