Whether we’re tweeting the minutiae of our daily lives from our cell phones, checking out the latest band pages on Myspace, chatting with friends on Facebook, looking up old high school buddies on Classmates or networking with colleagues on LinkedIn, we’re spending more and more time on social networking sites than ever before. Leading the pack, of course, are the usual suspects – Facebook and Twitter.
As a matter of fact, according to Nielsen, we’re spending 82% more time on social networking sites than we did just a year earlier. So much so, actually, that it’s nearly a full-time job.
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Up from just over three hours a day in 2008, we now spend about five and a half hours each day on social networking sites, with Facebook taking the lead by far in this category. We say that it’s rivaling a full-time job because our social networking does not, of course, take a break over the weekend. So, at five and a half hours a day, for seven days a week, we’re coming in just an hour and a half shy of 40 hours a week.
The numbers include statistics from the U.S., U.K., Australia, Brazil, Japan, Switzerland, Germany, France, Spain and Italy, and show the United States to be well in the lead, with over 140 million unique visitors in December 2009. If the numbers are right and each unique visitor is really a different person, than nearly half of the U.S. population visited a social networking site last month. Australia, on the other hand, leads the pack in time-per-day, with its users staying on social networking sites for just under seven hours daily.
One fact remains the same, as we’ve seen in study after study – Facebook is the clear leader in the social networking arena. While, despite other numbers showing Twitter’s overall slowdown in traffic, it remains the fastest growing site in terms of unique visitors, according to Nielsen.
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