Social media sites are wildly popular, but there are still no marketing rules
carved stone, and many companies grapple with measuring its value.
A majority of
companies do not have standard frameworks in place to measure the value
of social media.
In looking at a data snapshot of monthly
aggregate time spent on a site for Facebook
and the ROW (rest of the web), Facebook
has toppled some big names. The Nielsen
Company data show that even Yahoo users
come in a distant second with an average of
17.2 billion minutes per month, less than
one-third Facebook’s total.
In measuring time spent per user, Nielsen
data shows that for the second straight
month, Facebook dominated U.S. web
brands in average monthly time during
August 2011. The average Facebook user
spent seven hours, 46 minutes on the site.
AOL Media Network, averaged two hours,
52 minutes and 52 seconds. YouTube also
ranked in the top 10 with an average of one
hour, 41 minutes of user time for the month.
Enter Google. Google+ emerged as a player in the Social
Network and Forums category in late September, Experian
Hitwise reported, a day after the site went from invitationonly to open access
and became available to everyone.
Opening access created a massive spike in market share of
visits for the site, with a 1269% growth from the week
ending September 17 to the week of September 24. The
site also received nearly 15 million total US visits last week.
In just one week, Google+ went from ranking as 54th most
visited site in the Social Networking and Forums category to
8th place.
Google+ also received nearly 15
million total US visits during the week
of its initial public offering, according to
Experian Hitwise, not quite half of what
Twitter attracted in that time. Google+
also created a decent challenge to
MySpace and LinkedIn, sites that
received about 16 million and 18
million visits, respectively. During the
invite-stage of the launch, for week
ending July 16, Google+ received 1.86
million total visits.
Google+ Grabs 15 Million Visitors
Top Social Networking sites and Forums
Total visits, millions.
YouTube
Yahoo! Answers
Tagged
MySpace
Google+
The ROI research survey asked consumers about their discussions
on a variety of vertical products on social networks.
myYearbook
iVillage
Social sign-in is another growing activity
among social media users. SSI allows users to
sign into a restricted access site using existing
sign-in data, rather than having to create a new
account.
Windows Live Profile
QQ.com
microblogging
MySpace
Renren
Vkontakte
Orkut
Yahoo Pulse