Facebook has seen a month-by-month decline of 3.58% in user visits, but still accounts for over half of all social media traffic in the UK, according to new data from Hitwise.
The research, from Hitwise, also found that YouTube accounts for 1 in every 35 UK Internet visits and remains the fastest growing social media site in terms of visits.
YouTube now accounts for 22.54% of all visits to social networks, its highest market share of the UK social landscape recorded to date.
The search term ‘youtube’ was also the third biggest after term typed into search engines this month. The most popular search term was ‘facebook’, while ‘ebay’ was second.
Facebook, meanwhile, suffered a significant loss of market share of visits this month dropping from 53.72% to 50.14% of all UK Internet visits to social networks.
Facebook’s dominance of the UK social market hasn’t been this low since October 2009, when the network accounted for 50.46% of all visits to the category.
Robin Goad added: “The growth of YouTube over the last year has been outstanding. Now firmly entrenched as the UK’s third most visited website after Google UK and Facebook, YouTube continues to make advances in the field of online video. A lot of YouTube’s growth has come from usage on mobile devices.
“One in 20 visits to YouTube now comes from a mobile device used on a home WiFi network, and that doesn’t take into account the millions of videos watched each month using the 3G networks.
“We already know that mobile is the next digital frontier, and YouTube is a great example of a brand that is already reaping the rewards of attracting a strong affinity with smartphone and tablet users. The next step for marketers is to work out not just how to organise their search and social spend, but how much resource can be dedicated to the growing online mobile industry.”
YouTube increased its presence in social by extending its market share of visits to the Experian Hitwise Social Networking and Forums category from 20.52% in May to 20.76% in June. Facebook was the second fastest growing social network of the month, followed by Tumblr.
