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Online social networks are everywhere these days, a truly global phenomenon. But where are the different social networks having the most success in terms of popularity? That is what we’ll try to answer in this post.
We have included 11 social networks in this survey: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Orkut, Tumblr, FourSquare, MySpace, LiveJournal, Hi5 and Bebo.
Although Facebook is by far the largest social network out there, the social network sphere is large and has a ton of players. We were curious about which of them are the most active. To find these sites, we decided to focus on the number of daily visitors to each site.
The number of (unique) daily visitors is an interesting metric since it doesn’t rely on registered users (who may or may not be active) or monthly visitors, where some may visit the site as seldom as once per month. In short, you get a good idea of the day-to-day activity on a site.
Big sites and services like Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter and many others rely heavily on open source software to run their operations. Happily, this isn’t a one-way street. They are also giving back to the open source community, not just by contributing to existing projects, but sometimes by open sourcing their own internal projects, giving back something completely new.
And what these popular sites can contribute is often quite valuable. Since they tend to be very large, they run big operations and have been forced to create solutions for scalability and performance problems that most other sites simply don’t have to deal with.
How old is the average Twitter or Facebook user? What about all the other social network sites out there, like MySpace, LinkedIn, and so on? How is age distributed across the millions and millions of social network users out there?
To find out, we pulled together age statistics for 19 different social network sites, and crunched the numbers.
Some sites are utterly addictive. You return to them often, and when you do, you tend to stay there for a good while, visiting different pages, viewing interesting content. In a word, the site is engaging.
But how do you measure it? How do you put a number on how engaging a site is?
That is exactly what we are going to do in this post, and we will be looking at social network sites, arguably the most engaging sites out there.
Did you ever wonder how busy the servers of the world’s largest social networks are? It turns out it’s very hard work being popular, especially for the number one player.
According to data from Google, Facebook serves 260 billion page views per month. That’s more than six million page views per minute, or a staggering 37.4 trillion page views in a year. We can safely assume that Facebook’s web servers aren’t getting bored waiting around for work to do.
Have you ever wondered how many of Twitter’s users are women? Or men? What about Facebook, MySpace, Digg, LinkedIn, and other sites in the social media sphere?
We have tracked down this information for a number of social network sites (19 of them). All the major ones have been included, like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter and also some of the most popular social news sites; Digg, Reddit and Slashdot.
Comscore has released some interesting statistics about the US traffic to the business-oriented social networking site LinkedIn. According to Comscore, LinkedIn had 8 million US visitors in July this year, an increase of 66% compared to a year ago.
But the really interesting part was some data extraction about the kind of visitors that LinkedIn is getting. By cross-referencing visits to job-seeking sites with visits to LinkedIn, Comscore was able to estimate of how many of LinkedIn’s visitors are job seekers (and even to what degree those visitors are looking for a job).
Social networks are getting huge. So big, in fact, that many of them are competing in size with some of the largest countries in the world.
To give you (and us) a nice and visual overview of how today’s social networks stack up against countries in terms of sheer size, we have put together this chart.
Head on in to check it out!
This is a weekly recurring post about noteworthy incidents on the Internet. This includes for example general network issues, ISP problems and downtime for well-known websites. It may be things that have been detected by us here at Pingdom, or written about by others.
We are not going to be able to cover everything that happens out there, so if we omit anything that you feel is important, please feel free to add this information in the comments, preferably with a link to a source (such as a news article or service status page with relevant information).
This week it’s all about social networks: Trouble at Friendster, Twitter and LinkedIn.
