With all the fuss over the growth of Twitter let us not forget that there is a little site called Facebook that in the US, has still been under-represented compared to other countries in terms of it’s importance. In the US, visits to social networking websites increased 4% in February 2009 vs. February 2008 among a custom category of 55 of the top properties, while visits decreased 1% compared with January 2009 among those sites, according to data from Hitwise (via MarketingCharts).
MySpace accounted for 52.21% of those visits, the highest in the category, despite a decrease in visits of 28% compared with February 2008. In contrast to MySpace’s negative growth, US visits to Facebook increased 149% in February 2009 compared with February 2008. Facebook received the second-highest market share of US. visits for the month, with 36.03%. Tagged received 2.47% of visits in February 2009, the third-largest number, and had the largest percentage gain in market share of visits among the top five visited websites increasing 280% compared with February 2008.
MySpace had the highest average time spent among the top five most visited social networking sites, with 29 minutes and 38 seconds – though this represents a decrease of 2% compared with February 2008. Classmates.com experienced the largest growth in average time spent among the top five sites, increasing 9% in February 2009, to 11 minutes and 14 seconds. Both Facebook and Tagged saw an increase of 6% in average time spent on their sites.
Looking at the demographic breakdown of visitors to MySpace and Facebook, users between the ages 18-34 still dominate, as 58.81% and 53.91% of US visits, respectively, came from those combined age groups in February 2009. This represents a 2% growth for MySpace and a 14% decline for Facebook in terms of year-over-year percentages. Visitors to the sites who are age 35+ have increased 23% to Facebook in February 2009 compared with February 2008, while visitors from that age group to MySpace have declined 2%.
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