Social Media Global Trends -Impact of Time Spent on Social Media Campaigns

Nielsen recently published some interesting statistics on the growth of different social media sites across the globe.You can see the main chart above.

They show the unstoppable rise and rise of Facebook, to over 100m monthly visitors, though Twitter's rate of growth is now higher than Facebook's. Twitter saw growth of 579% year-on-year, from 2.7 million unique visitors in December 2008 to 18.1 million in December 2009.MySpace's decline also continues unabated.

Interestingly, the time per person dedicated to visiting social media sites shows the US, UK and Australia leading the way (Canada is not included in the data, but presumably would be amongst the leading group too). You can see this in the table below from the Nielsen study.

Any social media campaign would do well to take the time per person factor into account, as this will impact the degree of penetration of the campaign. Social media users in countries with higher time spent per user can be enagaged at a deeper level with both the social media campaign and its message. Conversely, if a country has a lower time spent per user (like Switzerland), this would indicate that campaign 'bursts' with shorter engagement times would be more effective.

Facebook and Nielsen launch joint ad effectiveness product

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook new COO, more recently VP of Global Ad Sales at Google, talked today to the press about the launch of the joint Nielsen/Facebook product to measure the effectivess of ad campaigns on Facebook web and mobile platforms.

Dubbed Nielsen Brand Lift, the new service is designed to help Facebook demonstrate that online ads on their social network are effective...as Facebook is expected to turnover more than $500m in the latest reporting year (most of which from ad sales), it is essential that they convince advertisers that this ad spend pays off. Ad sales for Facebook increased more than 70% this year compared to last year thanks to its growing user base, now exceeding 300m globally.

After their acquisition of Friendfeed earlier in the year, Facebook steps on the gas again to maintain its social networking supremacy and introduce a tool that will undoubtedly help justify ad spend. This is even more important as more and more of their users move to the mobile platform in order to educate advertisers of the high impact and effectiveness of this medium.