Americans more social online than last year

The online services arm of the New York based Nielsen Company revealed that the time people in the U.S. spent on social networking sites was up 83 percent in April 2009 compared to the comparative period last year.

Facebook reigns
Facebook continued to reign in the domain of online social networking with a total of 13.9 billion minutes having been spent on the Palo Alto, California based website. These minutes spent on Facebook represent a whopping 700 percent increase over the minutes spent on the site in April 2008.

While Facebook retained its numero uno slot in terms of ‘time spent’ on the sites, Twitter took the cake when it came to the criterion of ‘percentage increase of minutes spent’ on the sites. An astounding increase of 3,712 percent, as compared to the previous year, is what Twitter registered when it clocked 300 million minutes in April of 2009.

Jon Gibs, Nielsen's vice president for online media and agency insights, said of the changing dynamics in the industry, “We have seen some major growth in Facebook during the past year, and a subsequent decline in MySpace. Twitter has come on the scene in an explosive way perhaps changing the outlook for the entire space."

Pinch of salt
Neilson Online, the firm that essentially measures and analyses online audiences, advertising, video, consumer-generated media and consumer behavior, cautioned the online social networking players not to get carried away by the rosy numbers.

It noted that the class of viewers that is growing on such sites is very capricious. This audience is prone to quickly shifting away from services the moment the networking sites lose attractiveness, noted the research firm.

Suggesting the companies not to throw caution to the winds, Jon Gibs said in his blog posting, “Remember Friendster? Remember when MySpace was an unbeatable force? Neither Facebook nor Twitter are immune. Consumers have shown that they are willing to pick up their networks and move them to another platform, seemingly at a moment's notice."