We’re often thinking about what people are doing on social networks and one of the most common uses is keeping in touch with friends and family, especially for birthday greetings and holiday messages. Once the domain of e-greetings, social networks have instead become the common place to send & post messages. While the traffic to social networks continues to climb, the market share of visits to websites in the E-Greetings has declined each month year-over-year each month from January 2009 through January 2010. During the two peak months for E-Greetings category, February and December, visits decreased 24% and 16%, respectively.

On specific holidays, the same trend occurred, with the market share of visits to E-Greetings websites down, while the Social Networking category has increased. The only exception is Mother’s Day, where both are down and more people may be spending the day with their mothers rather than using social networks. Key holidays for the E-Greetings category, Valentine’s Day and Christmas Day, were both down 29% and 27%, respectively. Holidays have historically been a popular day for using social networks and Facebook, for example, became the most visited website on both Christmas Day and New Year’s Day, surpassing Google.

While there are many activities taking place on social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter, birthday (easy to remember the dates when other friends post messages) and holiday greetings appear to be eroding traffic away from the E-Greetings category.