Social Media is one of the fastest changing industries in existence. If you go even one month without reading the latest trends, websites, etc. you will find yourself well behind in your Social Media knowledge. In 2009, most people never even heard of FourSquare. Fast forward to 2010 and it has become one of the fastest growing Social Media tools on the market. That being said, a Social Media website’s popularity is extremely unpredictable. What is considered popular today might not be considered popular tomorrow. Given this rapidly changing environment, how do you determine where to allocate your Social Media efforts? Besides the obvious like relevancy to your target market, network size, etc. it is important to look at website trends to assess the growth of the network. A Social Media website might receive 1 million visits per month, but if it has been decreasing substantially every single month it might not be worth it to have a presence within this community. Below are snapshots of various Social Networks’ growth (in terms of visits) in 2010 broken down month by month (using Compete.com as the source).
Given the amount of press surrounding Facebook’s 500 millionth user, it is no surprise that the #1 Social Network has seen substantial growth in visits over the past year. The total growth (from 12/09 – 12/10) was approximately 35% with December being Facebook’s best month in terms of total number of visits.
MySpace
Any website that is receiving over 200,000 visits per month might sound worth your while, but not when it’s MySpace. The once dominant Social Network has continued to see a decrease in visits in 2010 of approximately 335% (!) from 12/09 – 12/10. While Compete.com isn’t 100% accurate in its numbers, the graph clearly outlines a website that has been seeing a substantial decrease in total visits.
After starting off strong in the first half of 2010, Twitter looks to have seen a decrease in visits over the last quarter of 2010. Even with the significant drop off in 2010, I don’t see Twitter become a less valuable marketing tool anytime soon. It will be interesting to see how the trends progress in 2011.
Digg
Even though Twitter’s decrease in traffic in the latter half of 2010 isn’t too much of a cause for concern, Digg is a completely different story. Digg had a horrible redesign in August 2010 which caused many users to abandon the website. The surge in traffic in June, July, and August are likely related to the PR associated with Digg’s new website design. The significant decrease in September illustrates the negative impact the website redesign has had on Digg and it seems to have been decreasing ever since.
Digg’s main competitor, Reddit, benefited greatly from Digg’s failed website redesign. When comparing 12/10 to 12/09, the website saw an increase of approximately 133% in total visits. Reddit announced recently there website reached 1 billion page views (proved via a Google Analytics screenshot) over a 30 day period for the first time ever. Reddit should continue to see growth in the 2011 year.
YouTube
It’s no surprise that YouTube continues to receive a substantial amount of traffic given it’s dominance in the video market. I am a little surprised, however, about how much the website has grown in total visits over the past year (total of approximately 94%). The website has continued to grow in total visits each month with December and there is no indication that this will slow down anytime soon.
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