pakistani news: YouTube and Twitter erode Facebook?s dominance of social

Thursday, June 16, 2011

YouTube and Twitter erode Facebook?s dominance of social

Analyst Weblog

? New York more popular than Australia for flight searches |

June 14, 2011

In this month?s search and social analysis release we saw some pretty interesting trends in our Social Networking and Forums category, including a bumper month of traffic for Twitter, extended growth for YouTube and a declining market share for Facebook.

Last month I blogged about the growth of YouTube and how the video website now accounts for 1 in every 5 visits to all social networking sites. In May YouTube continued its growth, accounting for 20.52% of all visits to the Social Networks and Forums category.

Meanwhile Twitter had its biggest month of traffic ever, in part because of the super-injunction revelations, but also because the micro-blogging platform has carved a niche for itself as an excellent platform through which Internet users can share and consume news. Recent examples like the death of Osama Bin Laden, the Egypt crisis and the resurgence of the ash cloud have all been shared and discussed on Twitter.

What?s interesting is that the growth of YouTube and Twitter is coming at the expense of Facebook. Since the beginning of 2011, Facebook?s market share of visits within the Social Networks and Forums category has fallen from nearly 58% to hover around the 54% mark.

Despite the drop in market share in recent months, Facebook needn?t be reaching for the panic button yet. Although its market share is declining slightly, Facebook still commands over half of the visits to the fastest growing category online, and having a slightly smaller proportion of an ever increasing pie is still a very healthy place to be. However, it does raise the question: has Facebook now finished its growth phase in the UK, and what will a ?stable? usage figure look like? This is obviously something that we will continue to monitor closely over the coming months.

Google meanwhile continues to cling to its market share in the search sphere. Although the exact numbers fluctuate each month, Google has consistently held over 90% market share of all searches conducted by UK Internet users, and each time Bing or Yahoo! make a gain, Google always seems to bounce back stronger than ever.

Seach engines top May 2011.png

Facebook may well emulate Google?s performance within its own arena of dominance. Certainly historically Facebook has always been stronger in the second half of the year than the first and as momentum continues to build around social media Facebook can capitalise on this exrtraordinary area of online growth.

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