Facebook soars, MySpace drops and Twitter cools down

Posted by Erina Lin on October 12, 2009 at 11:32 AM

Social networking seems to experience a dramatic reversal this year, according to the new data from Hitwise. Facebook has gained significantly - with its share of U.S. traffic to social sites up about fourfold from 19.9 percent last year to 58.6 percent as of September. MySpace, on the contrary, has its share tumbled from 66.8 percent to 30.3 percent, down 55 percent, Media Post reported.

Although Twitter, the hottest property in this category, is still niche (1.84 percent share) compared to other bigger players, it has gained drastically 1170 percent from 0.15 percent a year ago.

However, according to Hitwise, Twitter's torrid growth has slowed down since April. The percentage of new Twitter users from other sites also declined in mid-September compared to April.

From August to September, Twitter's share slipped from 1.95 percent to 1.84 percent. Although the figures didn't reflect Twitter's mobile and application-driven traffic, Hitwise said they should still correlate to new user adoption.

According to comScore, Twitter's monthly traffic has slipped at about 20 million visitors since July, after a spike to 17 million in April from 4 million in February. "The microblogging service could just be in a lull before another growth spurt," according to Media Post.

Facebook, meanwhile, announced that it had reached the 300 million mark in users worldwide in September, after exceeding 250 million only in July. While Facebook's traffic surpassed MySpace this spring, one area where MySpace still takes lead is in average time spent - at 25 minutes, 56 seconds, according to Hitwise.

However, even the advantage is about to disappear. Average time spent on Facebook grew 23 percent in the last year to 23 minutes, while that on MySpace declined 12 percent. Time spent on social networking site Tagged.com also rose 8 percent to 25 minutes and 17 seconds, while that on Twitter fell 55 percent from 36:27 to 15:52, media Post reported.

Facebook outperformed among older users aged 55 and over, with its share up more than double to 13.53 percent. Visits from this age group have overall boosted 77 percent in the last year.

However, the age group Facebook has seen a steep drop is people among 35 to 45, down 30.3 percent of visitors to merely 18.4 percent.