Updated As social media like blogs, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube grow increasingly popular among consumers, marketers are seeking more data about the changing behavior of their customers.
Nielsen, which has long provided such information about the traditional media, is seeking to become a go-to source of data for new media, too. To help bolster that, Nielsen is to release on Monday morning a report of a kind it says it has not published before, a big-picture look at social media.
NOTE: You can also view an online and download a PDF copy of Nielsen's "State of the Media: The Social Media Report - Q3 2011" report HERE.
Although the conclusions of the report are not surprising, it is interesting to read in “State of the Media: The Social Media Report” just how large a role social media are playing in the lives of consumers.
Social media account for 22.5 percent of the time that Americans spend online, according to the report, compared with 9.8 percent for online games and 7.6 percent for e-mail.
That makes social media the No. 1 specific category and the No. 2 category over all, behind “other” ways Americans spend time online, among them perusing adult content, visiting retail Web sites and reading about subjects like sports and health.
Radha Subramanyam, senior vice president for media and advertising insights and analytics at Nielsen in New York said.
“Social media is becoming increasingly mainstream.”
As a result, “there’s a need for companies to engage even more strategically in the space” than they already do, she added.
The social media brand that Americans spend the most time with, the report finds, is Facebook, by an enormous margin. During May, when the report was compiled, Americans spent 53.5 billion minutes on facebook.com from computers at home and work. (That was up 6 percent from 50.6 billion minutes in May 2010.)
Ms. Subramanyam said of the dominance of Facebook in the social media realm. The reason is simple, she added:
“We’ve been seeing that for a while. It’s an incredibly fun way to spend time.”
Behind Facebook during May was:
- Blogger - 723.8 million minutes
- Tumblr - 623.5 million minutes
- Twitter - 565.2 million minutes
- LinkedIn - 325.7 million minutes
Facebook reaches 70 percent of active Internet users in the United States, the report says, and of the visitors to Facebook, 62 percent were female.
More women than men watch video clips on blogs and social networks, according to the report, but men stream more videos and spend more time watching them than women.
COMMENTARY: It comes as no surprise that internet users are spending more time on Facebook than any other social media site. Hey, blogging is in No 2 with Blogger and Tumblr. That's good news. And, they said blogging was dying. So wrong.
Courtesy of an article dated September 11, 2011 appearing in The New York Times Media & Advertising
Comments