About

Jeremiah Owyang
SF, Silicon Valley

Partner, Customer StrategyAltimeter GroupColumnist forForbes CMO Network

Categories: Social Media Stats, Social Networking, Web UsagePosted on January 11th, 2009

If you’re seeking stats from 2008, I’ve compiled them on this similar post of 2008 social networking stats. Update, now see the 2010 stats.

Stats are important –but on their own, they don’t tell us much
Stats on social networks are important, but I’m going to need your help in creating a community archive, can you submit stats as you find them? I’m often asked, “What are the usage numbers for X social network” and I’ve received considerable traffic on my very old post (way back in Jan 08) of MySpace and Facebook stats, even months later. Decision makers, press, media, and users are hungry for numbers, so I’ll start to aggregate them as I see them.

How I interpret stats
Numbers don’t tell us much without insight and interpretation, in fact, you’re going to see conflicting numbers of usage from many of the agencies and social networks themselves. The key is to look at trend movements, don’t focus on the specific numbers but the changes to them over time. I put more weight on active unique users in the last 30 days vs overall registered, in fact, the actual active conversion rate will often range from 10-40% of actual users sticking around and using the social network, so don’t be fooled by puffed numbers. No single metric is a good indicator, you have to evaluate the usage from multiple dimensions, so you also have to factor in what are users doing, time on site, interaction, and of course, did they end up buying, recommending products, or improving their lives.

All Social Networks

Techcrunch has listed out comscore’s numbers across multiple social networks, Sources: Techcrunch via Comscore, Jan 1, 2009

Compete has released stats in Feb, comments by Cnet. Unique Visitors, Total Visitors and rank information. Cnet, Feb 10, 2009

Nielsen Online shows that: Social networks and blogs are now the 4th most popular online activity ahead of personal email, Member communities are visited by 67% of the global online population, time spent is growing at 3 times the overall internet rate, accounting for almost 10% of all internet time, PDF, Nielsen Online, March

Nielsen reports that Social Networks 68% more popular than email 65% (but not by much), Nielsen, Cnet, March 2009

Techcrunch has an interesting application that shows which social networks dominate by country, June 2009

eMarketer has compiled stats from themselves and others on the different age groups of Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn, July 2009

Ignite has data on a variety of social networks that includes traffic and demographic data. July 2009

Gender: Royal Pingdom compares social networks based by gender, in almost all cases, women dominate social networking sites over men. Nov 30, 2009 READ MORE