Top Social Networks: The Summer of Social? from Compete.com's blog, provides some interesting information about the popularity of social network sites for June, 2007, measured by number of visitors and how much attention they devote to the sites.
mySpace and Facebook are the clear winners in this measurement. The post includes a map of US mySpace users by geographic area (California and the Northeast corridor are where the greatest concentrations of mySpace users live.) Comparing the geographic distribution and density of mySpace users versus Facebook users, andthe post notes that mySpace receives 25% more visits per visitor per month than Facebook, with 72 million unique mySpace users making more than 1.3 billion total visits in June.
Today's post also includes the June ranking of the top 20 social networking sites, ranked by
attention.
I found some surprises here:
- Classmates.com, arguably one of the first social networking sites, albeit cumbersome and costly, ranked #8 on the list (although with an attention decline of 19%) in June.
- QuePasa.com, recently resurrected with new ownership, made the list at #16, with an attention increase of 189% in June, the largest increase (percentage-wise) on the list (although based on the second lowest number of visits.)
- LinkedIn squeaked in at #20, although with a decrease of 6% in attention in June.
- Friendster, at #9, actually showed a 6% increase in attention in June.
- Facebook, with nearly 23 million June visitors, had an attention rating of just 1.52%, with a 19% month over month increase.
- Although more than half the sites included have seven or eight figure visit counts, none approach mySpace in terms of the attention metric.
- MySpace is the clear king of this ranking, with more than 72 million monthly visitors, and an attention rating of 12.75%, a month over month increase of 20%, for June.
Compete.com has numerous tools for measuring site traffic and visitor engagement. (
More about the methodology used to generate this data.) These numbers may not make it easier to decide how to engage social network users, but they do provide unique data to help spot the next big thing in social media, and to put media coverage and buzz in perspective based on user data.
Also on the social networking subject, I added several new articles about Facebook to my Del.icio.us links:
http://del.icio.us/sheywood/facebook today. Enjoy!
Labels: facebook, linkedin, MySpace, Phoenix.Social.Media.Club socialmedia, social.media, social.networking, socialmedia