Member Communities More Popular Than Email

We all know that the use of social networking sites (SNS) has rocketed over the last year or so. Now a new report from the analytics company Nielsen has provided some figures to back up the trend.

According to the Neilsen report, Global Faces and Networked Places, the use of “Member Communities” (social networks and blogs) now accounts for almost 9.3% of time spent online. Such sites have now overtaken the use of email and are accessed by over two thirds of users in the areas Neilsen monitors. Growth in member communities has been twice as fast as any of the other major sectors.

Facebook remains the most popular social site and is accessed by a massive three out of ten people online in the nine markets Neilsen tracks (China and India aren’t included). The biggest local success story is Google’s Orkut with a 70% online reach in Brazil.

The use of social sites via mobile cellphones is increasing rapidly, especially in the UK where 23% of mobile web users visit social networks through their handset compared with 19% in the US. My personal suspicion is that in the UK this is set to rise further with the recent surge in popularity over here of Twitter and its suitability for SMS text updates.