For the third year running (see 2008, 2009) I’m going to aggregate stats in the social networking space on a single blog post, and update it through the year. Data fiends should bookmark this post for future reference.

Stats are important –but on their own, they don’t tell us much

Stats on social networks are important, but don’t rely on them alone. Data is like fire, it can be used for good and bad, proper insight and analysis is always required. Beyond that, you’ll often see conflicting stats across the industry as everyone has different methodologies, as a result, this listing will help you to see the greater trends –not numbers without context.

How to interpret stats

Numbers don’t tell us much without insight and interpretation, in fact, you’re going to see conflicting numbers of usage from many of the agencies and social networks themselves. The key is to look at trend movements, don’t focus on the specific numbers but the changes to them over time. Put more weight on active unique users in the last 30 days vs overall registered, in fact, the actual active conversion rate will often range from 10-40% of actual users sticking around and using the social network, so don’t be fooled by puffed numbers. No single metric is a good indicator, you have to evaluate the usage from multiple dimensions, so you also have to factor in what are users doing, time on site, interaction, and of course, did they end up buying, recommending products, or improving their lives.

A Collection of Social Network Stats for 2010

I’ll be updating this post throughout the year, bookmark it, and share it with others.

Comparison: All Social Networks

“The data doesn’t deny that Facebook has come to dominate social networking in the US, and overtook MySpace in 2009. But MySpace’s 57 million US unique users are nothing to sneeze at – it’s still a top web property with users who are highly engaged. The second tier networks, such as Tagged, Hi5, MyYearbook and Bebo, still receive an impressive 3-6 million uniques per month, and users spend a fair amount of time on those sites. BlackPlanet users spent 3.6 minutes longer interacting with the site than the average Facebook visitor. MyYearbook and Tagged users were on these sites more than 3 minutes longer than the average MySpace visitor. There is definitely addictive behavior occuring on these other sites.” LeeAnn Prescott (Someone I personally trust), Feb 2009

Nielsen published stats showing that “three of the world’s most popular brands online are social-media related (Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia) and the world now spends over 110 billion minutes on social networks and blog sites. This equates to 22 percent of all time online or one in every four and half minutes. For the first time ever, social network or blog sites are visited by three quarters of global consumers who go online, after the numbers of people visiting these sites increased by 24% over last year. The average visitor spends 66% more time on these sites than a year ago, almost 6 hours in April 2010 versus 3 hours, 31 minutes last year.” Nielsen, June, 2010

By Region and Geography

Japan: This slideshare has data on Japan’s mobile behaviors, and demonstrates how most social networks are accessed through mobile devices, and discusses Twitter, Facebook, and other social network adoption. Japan’s Cellphone Edge, 2010.

Facebook

Facebook keeps it’s stats page updated, and boasts over 350mm users. Facebook, ongoing

Facebook has announced 400mm users, Feb 5, 2010.

Infographic on Auguts 2009 Facebook stats, including usage, size, adoption rates by Mashable, on Feb 12.

Facebook demonstrates growth in total number of visitors (now over Yahoo, for second place) and a high degree of attention (time on site) “Facebook has surged past Yahoo as the number two most popular site in the U.S., drawing nearly 134 Million Unique Visitors in January, 2010. It’s been two full years since we’ve seen a shakeup at the top – In February, 2008, Google overtook Yahoo as number one, and never looked back.” Compete, Feb 18, 2010

Usage of casual gaming (Farmville, mafia wars) is suggested to be by moms. A PopCap survey reports that “The PopCap study showed that 55 percent of all social gamers in the U.S. are women, as are almost 60 percent of those in the UK. The average age in the U.S. is 48, which is substantially older than the 38-year-old average in the UK, and 46 percent of American social gamers are 50 or older, compared with just 23 percent in the UK. Only 6 percent of all social gamers are age 21 or younger.” Via GigaOm, Feb 18

Facebook visitors to other sites are apparently more sticky at least by a few margin points: “To offer one example, 81% of visits to CNN.com in the week to March 6, 2010 were returning visitors while 84% of visitors to CNN.com that came from Facebook.com were returning visitors and 72% from Google News were returning visitors.” One could argue that these Facebook users are more engaged, or content that is recommended to them by friends is more relevant. Hitwise, March 18

Facebook has cross the 500mm user mark, see blog post from CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg, July 21, 2010

Top countries adopting Facebook: United States, UK, Indonesia, see stats from Royal Pingdom, August, 2010



LinkedIn

Now has 60mm users, “Over the past year, network has seen a significant amount of growth, especially internationally. As of last December, the network had 55 million members, so its grown by 5 million in less than two months. In October, LinkedIn’s network’s CEO, Jeff Weiner, said in the post that half of LinkedIn’s membership is international. ” reports Techcrunch, Feb 11

Tagged

All data told to me by Tagged directly on March 24 by ssarner at tagged.com

Statistics: Total Registered Users: 100 Million

Global Monthly Unique Visitors: 16 million

USA Monthly Unique Visitors: 6 million

Daily Users: 3.5 million

Monthly Page Views: 7 billion

Attention USA (comScore) Average Minutes per Visit: 12.2 – #1 social network

Total Monthly Minutes: 796 Million – #3 social network

10 million new friend connections made everyday

Tagged “Meet Me” application produces 40 million daily page views

Over 100,000 user generated virtual gifts, TAGS and skins available.

Average of 75,000 – 100,000 new daily registrants

Twitter

Hubspot luanches a report of Twitter.com registrations and shows a decrease in rate of adoption. There’s also useful data within the report about followers and their behaviors based on a sample methodology. Hubspot, Jan 19, 2010.

Sysmos launched a report about global usage of Twitter, with most adoption in US. Interesting that the key nugget is “… the number of U.S. unique users was 50.8%, a sharp drop from 62.1% in June. This suggests the use of Twitter outside the U.S. has experienced significant growth over the past six months.”, Jan 14th, Sysmos. Thanks Jean in the comments for the submission.

Data indicates that many Twitter users are not active. read “The number of Twitter users has climbed to a lofty 75 million, but the growth rate of new users is slowing and a lot of current Twitterers are inactive” ComputerWorld, Jan 28

Twitter themselves finally publish numbers indicating there are 50mm tweets created each day. “Folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007. By 2008, that number was 300,000, and by 2009 it had grown to 2.5 million per day. Tweets grew 1,400% last year to 35 million per day. Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day—that’s an average of 600 tweets per second. (Yes, we have TPS reports.)” Twitter, Feb 22

Twitter co-owner Biz Stone has revealed that the site now has 105 million registered users. He revealed the startling number at a Twitter developer conference, aptly title Chirp, and also mentioned that 30,000 people a day are signing up to tweet. Techradar, from Twitter, April 14

Black people, who account for about 12% of the population in general, make up 25% of the Twitter population. Business Insider May 2010

Yelp

As Yelp has grown from fledgling start-up to critical mass website, serving over 30 million visitors a month. Brainstorm tech, April .

YouTube

Find out who is creating the top YouTube videos and who is embedding them. “The study also looked at the demographics of bloggers who embed these videos. In general, 20-to-35-year-old bloggers embed most of the videos (57%), followed by teenagers (20%) and bloggers over 35 (20%).” Including stats on average number of comments, duration and other tidbits, Read Write Web, Feb 15.

Mobile, Desktop and Social Networks

There’s a sea change in more people using social networks from mobile devices rather than desktop clients “more people are using the mobile web to socialize (91%) compared to the 79% of desktop users who do the same. It appears that the mobile phone is actually a better platform for social networking than the PC.” Ruder Fin via Read Write Web, Feb 2010

I’ll continue to update this page over time, please leave a comment if you have 2010 submissions, I’ll credit you.