10 March 2009 | Author: J. Cave SEO Consultant

Social media trumps good ol' fashioned emailing

It wasn't that long ago that email was the new, exciting, addictive pastime we just couldn't get enough of. Now it's all about Facebook, Twitter, blogs and every other kind of social media out there.

A study of last December by Nielsen Online shows that more people logged onto 'member community' websites than accessed e-mail accounts.

According to the study, around two thirds of us now use social networking sites and blogs to communicate, a figure just above that of email.

It comes as no surprise that the most popular of the social networking sites is Facebook. With its greatest saturation within the UK, Facebook holds the profiles of around 47% of Britons closely followed by 44% of Italians.

Unlike its competitors Myspace and Bebo, Facebook has managed to grow its audience by focusing on a slightly older demographic. Facebook now has nearly twice as many over fifties visitors than it has under eighteen users.

Another big craze of the last twelve months has been Twitter. So popular is the micro-blogging service that it has attracted high profile users such as Barack Obama, Boris Johnson and a now a wide range of companies trying to uncover the service's marketing potential.

While Twitter has gradually been gathering market share in the United States for quite some time, it has only just started to take off in the United Kingdom. The report by Nielsen shows only 230,000 UK visitors in December, however this jumped up to 685,000 in January. Predictions for the February figures expect more than a million Britons to now be logging into the service.

One of the biggest driving forces accounting for the growth in services like Facebook and Twitter is the use of web-based mobile phone services. Once again UK users take the lead with 23% of social media users accessing the service via their mobile phone.

Social media continues to grow, and according to Nielsen, shows no signs of slowing down any time soon.

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