Since I have to advise my clients on a day to day basis how they can get the most from the web I try to keep a close eye on social networking since it is all of the rage these days. One of the ways I do this is to read mashable.com.
I was just getting caught up on my Mashable Newsfeed this morning and ran across an interesting article about how Facebook had recently taken the worldwide lead in social networking traffic from MySpace. This just goes to add credibility to my opinion that Facebook is a far superior network to MySpace.
While Facebook recently took the worldwide lead in social networking traffic, MySpace has been quick to point out that they still lead by a wide margin in the more lucrative US market. But that gap is continuing to narrow, according to the latest stats from Nielsen Online. Sporting 76% year-over-year growth, Facebook slimmed the margin it trails MySpace in the US by more than 5 million monthly unique visitors.
With 34.3 million visitors in July, Facebook still sits well behind MySpace (59.2 million), but considering that the latter has essentially stopped growing in the US (down 3% y-o-y according to Nielsen), it would appear that Facebook is within striking distance. Additionally, considering the school year is traditionally Facebook’s busy season, the gap may be even narrower than the most recent stats suggest. Compete’s data for July shows a similar trend, with an even smaller margin between the two sites:
Why does it matter? In addition to competitive bragging rights, the growth and size of the world’s two biggest social networks have major implications on their respective search partners – Google and Microsoft. Google has been disappointed with their MySpace results to-date, while Microsoft is expected to roll out Live Search on Facebook later this year.
Elsewhere, LinkedIn continues to grow quickly, registering more than 10 million monthly uniques in July. Music focused social networking application provider Imeem also had a big month, registering 3.9M unique visitors, placing it handily above competitor Last.fm (2.4M).
Facebook Narrows the Traffic Gap on MySpace in the US
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