After showing a slight drop in US (Compete and Comscore) and Worldwide (Comscore) Facebook visitor numbers in February, both metrics firms now confirm that it’s business as usual with the social network growing in popularity again.

Comscore says that Facebook had 472 million uniques in Jan, 463 million in March and 484 million in Feb.   However, Comscore seems to suggest that the February blip was to do with social media as a whole as both MySpace and Twitter also saw drops in February and a rise again in March.

And the stats from Facebook itself?   At the beginning of February Facebook had itself down as having 400 million active monthly users. Inside Facebook then estimated it at 436 million for March using the Facebook advertiser tool.

Inside Facebook mentions Facebook staffers in saying that it’s now passed the 450 million active user mark.   To put that into perspective, there are now more Facebook users than there are people in South America (382 million).

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The other day I posted about Nielsen’s stats showing that the over 25s (and over 35s in particular) are the most active on mobile social networks, as opposed to teens.   The other giant metrics firm, Comscore (via Marketing Charts), has now produced figures about the growth of mobile social networking in general.

Looking at the US, Comscore worked out that access to Facebook via mobiles grew by 112% over the past year, while mobile Twitter access went up 347%.

At the same time, MySpace continues to decline on mobiles as well as on the Web, with 7% less users accessing it via their mobile devices.

Unsurprisingly, the growth in mobile social networking comes from smartphone users – hence the over 35s that Nielsen talked about who are both more likely to be able to afford one and also get one via their jobs.    30.8% of smartphone users accessed mobile social networks, compared to just 6.8% of more run of the mill ‘feature phone’ users.

A well known rule of thumb in business is the so-called Pareto principle (or the 80/20 rule) that 20% of participants will account for 80% of the activity.   Metrics firm Nielsen decided to test out if the same applies to Twitter – do 20% of tweeple account for 80% of what takes place on Twitter.

The answer is no.   At least in the UK, an even smaller number – 7% – account for 79% of Twitter activity.

Nielsen found that ‘light’ users (less than 2 minutes per month, actually broken across 30 days that is pretty much zero) account for 67% of the audience, medium users (22 mins per month, so still less than a minute a day) account for 26%, while heavy users (1hr+ a month) account for 7% of UK tweeple.

Nielsen’s stats confirm previous ones by Canadian research firm Sysomos, which showed that there is a group of 5% of Twitter power users who are responsible for 75% of Twitter activity.

Similarly, in January, RJ Metrics produced a report saying that only 17% of Twitter accounts had sent a single tweet over the month, which would put Twitter’s ‘real’ user base at around 10-15 million worldwide (with perhaps 700-900k in the UK) as opposed to the 75 million registered users.

Again, the fact that there are probably less than a million people in the UK making habitual use of Twitter shouldn’t matter.   News often breaks on Twitter and, due to the large proportion of bloggers and journalists that listen in on the network, moves elsewhere.

As the founder of spoof political website mydavidcameron.com (lampooning ads featuring the UK Conservative Party leader) found, chatter about his website started on Twitter and then quickly moved on from there to Facebook and finally to the media at large.

Finally, it’s also worth bearing in mind Nielsen’s observations that other networks similarly have a core of power users who dominate.  Three percent (3%) of MySpace visitors account for 63% of time spent on the site while 5% of LinkedIn visitors account for 50% of LinkedIn activity.   A challenge for marketers targeting those networks is obviously to zero in on, and find out who those three or five percent are.

Linking in with its role as a network, which according to Reuters is rapidly gaining ‘tech lock in’, Facebook however has a higher participation rate -  52% of users account for almost everything (98%) that goes on.

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The other month a report came out from Harvard Business School showing that 10% of users create 90% of tweets (or – the alternative I tend to use from Sysomos, a core of 5% accounts for 75% of activity).

It received a fair amount of attention, but some of the other findings around how we use social networks are worth looking at.   In particular, according to academic Mikolaj Jan Piskorski:

We’re by and large visually led.   “Seventy percent of all actions are related to viewing pictures or viewing other people’s profiles”

The latter also shows an element of voyeurism, in particular by men towards women on social networks.    The biggest usage categories are men looking at women they don’t know, followed by men looking at women they do know.    In fact, women get 2/3 of all page views.

This includes men in existing relationships looking at women they don’t know.   According to Piskorski, “it’s an easy way to see if anyone might be a better match.”

MySpace snobbery?
Finally, the findings on MySpace are interesting.   MySpace has been written off as a dying social network, despite the fact that it still has 70 million regular users in the US alone.

Pisorski raises the question of whether a lot of the negative press coverage stems from the fact that media and creative types like ourselves no longer use it:

“The fascinating answer, acquired by studying a dataset of 100,000 MySpace users, is that they largely populate smaller cities and communities in the south and central parts of the country.” Alabama, Arkansas, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Florida.

In other words, “MySpace has a PR problem because its users are in places where they don’t have much contact with people who create news that gets read by others.    Other than that, there is really no difference between users of Facebook and MySpace, except they are poorer on MySpace.”

Reminds me a little bit of a recent debate about mobile apps at the Internet Advertising Bureau, where one of the arguments against apps (and for mobile sites) was that apps are talked up partially because creative directors in marketing agencies love iPhones.
Image – Gerlos

Via Wildcat 2030

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Over the past two years there’s been a raft of research showing that women are increasingly more active than men in social media…for example last year there was the Rapleaf study showing that women tended to have more social network friends than men.

Another piece of research by Royal Pingdom confirms the trend.  It shows that most of the networks that could be considered to be ‘social’ in the real sense of the word – Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Bebo have a user base that’s 50%+ female.  Networks that are arguably much more functional in the sense that you save or tag articles – Reddit and Digg by comparison have more of a male bias.

The chart below shows more detail.   All in all, 53% of users across the 19 sites were female and 47% were male.

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