Nielson Company, in their report “Internet & Social Media Consumer Insights,” just released some impressive data on social networking activity in the U.S. The company reported Internet users spent an average of 6 hours, 13 minutes on social networking sites, just in the month of May 2010. That number was just 3 hours, 31 minutes last year.
In addition, the research showed the average U.S. worker spends almost 5.5 hours a month visiting social network sites from the office. Perhaps the efforts of many companies to ban social networks from the workplace might not be achieving the goal!
The data confirmed that Facebook is still the leading contender of social networking sites with a unique audience of 125.2 million visitors. Twitter has a unique U.S. audience of 19.1 million visitors (May 2010). This is a massive growth of more than 1,520% in the last two years!
Other interesting factoids from the Nielson study:
- 75% of all active U.S. Internet households visited a social networking site in May 2010. How does that compare globally? In April 2010, the global number was 74%—almost identical to the U.S. percentage.
- 22% of the time spent online is attributed to social networking sites.
- 20% of U.S. adults online publish or own a blog.
- 55% have at least one or more social networking profiles.
- 20% of those surveyed frequently provide advice about movies, 18% share their opinions about TV shows and 16% often advise others about music.