comScore’s “The 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Review” report is a great summary of social media trends.
According to the report, nearly four out of five US Internet users visited a social networking site in December 2009. Social networking now accounts for 11 percent of all time spent online in the US. Both social networking leader Facebook and Twitter both posted triple-digit growth.
Facebook grew substantially across nearly every performance metric in 2009. Unique visitors, page views, and total time spent all increased by a factor of two or more. Facebook’s audience was evenly split visitors younger and older than 35 years of age. The most noticeable demographic shift occurred with 25-34 year olds, who now account for 23% of the audience, up from 18.8% last year.
Twitter’s initial success was largely driven by users in the 25-54 year old age segment, but as it gained popularity, younger users flooded to the site in large numbers, with those under age 18 (up 6.2 percentage points) and 18-24 year olds (up 7.9 percentage points) representing the fastest growing demographic segments.
Report available for download (registration required) from comScore.
