Social Media phenomenon, Facebook, has become the third most visited site in the UK and is closing in on second placed Hotmail, the online email service owned by Microsoft. According to internet monitoring company, Hitwise, Facebook received 2.75% of UK internet traffic last month beating eBay at 2.46%. The top site is, obviously, Google.
Facebook and eBay are both extremely addictive, almost hypnotic sites with strong social elements to them as well as a powerful brand. Both have a very loyal base of users who return regularly to the site and spend a lot of time on site for each visit.
According to Hitwise, visitors to Facebook are more likely to be female and are younger on average. They are also more likely to live in London and the South East of England.
Facebook was founded in 2004 and was initially limited to Harvard University students before being expanded to other Ivy League colleges. Later it was expanded to all university students, high school students then anyone.
Facebook has become the most popular social networking site in the UK in the last two years, overtaking both MySpace and Bebo in the process. Facebook is seen as a potential goldmine for online marketing due to a user base that, as well as being large, is more affluent than other social networking sites.
Marketing using social networking sites such as Facebook is still really in its infancy although there have been very successful viral campaigns utilising the site. At the moment Facebook has an agreement to only display adverts from Microsoft's advertising network on the site.
