Social networking has continued to be one of the most activities online with online users, second only to search (and likely to surpass soon). The Social Networking category has experienced a resurgence of growth as websites like Facebook and Twitter have increased in popularity. Visits to a custom category of 155 Social Networking websites increased 53% during the week ending Sept 5, 2009 when compared to the same week the previous year. During the past 5 weeks, visits to the category reached the highest levels of the past three years. The previous peak occurred during the week ending June 23, 2007 when visits to MySpace reached their highest point.

Two major players continue to dominate the Social Networking custom category, Facebook and MySpace. During the week ending May 30, 2009, Facebook displaced MySpace as the top social network ranked by visits and has since also become the second ranked website overall behind Google. For the week ending September 5, 2009, Facebook captured nearly 58% of visits in the Social Networking custom category, followed by MySpace with 31%.

There are several drivers that have helped the growth of Facebook – such as a cleaner layout and mobile applications on the iPhone and BlackBerry to access Facebook anywhere. Another is certainly the Facebook Connect program, which allows users to share stories in their news feed and make comments on websites and blogs. The program launched in beta during July of last year, then officially launched to developers in early December. The number of websites participating in Facebook Connect has grown quickly to over 15,000 websites (globally) including CNN.com, NBC.com, ABCNews.com, Hulu, WashingtonPost.com, The Huffington Post, and others. And what is really interesting is to look at the year-over-year growth in the market share of visits to Facebook because there is a clear uptick in the growth rate following the launch of Facebook Connect.

A clear benefit of Facebook Connect is the ability of the user to use a single portable identity – and most importantly, one password, rather than logging into multiple accounts across the network of websites. Facebook’s recent purchase of FriendFeed will also help to aggregate this single portable identity across the Internet. Participation from websites in Facebook Connect also has strong implications to appear more often in the search results executed on Facebook resulting from member postings as search becomes a more prevalent activity within this large audience.
For more about the social networking landscape, watch the archive of our webinar, ‘As the World Tweets: Trends in the Social Media Landscape.’