Forrester Analyst Jeremiah Owyang wrote a post collecting social networking stats over at his Web Strategy blog, and it has become a pretty good collection of the latest-available statistics on social media traffic and usage patterns. I’d recommend checking out the full post, in which he details all of his sources and also links to some additional resources. We’ve distilled some highlights from his posts and from some of the comments here–what’s clear is that this is still a very inexact science, and many of these claims are unverified, but the numbers are big:
- Bebo: 40 million total registered users as of Nov 2008
- Digg: estimates range from 16.3 million to 35 million unique users per month
- Facebook: more than 120 million active users (does not indicate measure of active); the 4th most-trafficked website in the world
- LinkedIn: 8 million to more than 30 million
- MySpace: more than 110 million monthly active users around the globe as of Jan 2008
- Reunion: 50 million registered members as of Nov. 2008
- Second LIfe: logged-in during last 30 days: 985,92 (out of 16 million total registered)
- Twitter: 5.57 million global visitors to Twitter in Septembe; Tokyo is the city with the most tweets
- WeeWorld: 25 million registered users, and 1million unique active visitors in last 30 days
- Delicious: 5 million users and 150 bookmarked URLs
We’ll repeat Jeremiah’s caveat that the accuracy of these numbers are very much up to debate!
From his comments, here are some other links to sites that are collecting social media stats:
- Social Media Research Snack Facts
- Best (free) Sources To Get Social Media Audience Usage Research on Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media
- Nielsen’s September 2008 ranking of the ten largest and ten fastest-growing social media sites
