Global Uprising: The Nielsen Company on Social Networking Usage Trends

How long would you say you spend each month engaged with social media websites? If you answered five and a half hours or more, you're in good company. According to data from The Nielsen Company, "global consumers spent more than five and half hours on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter in December 2009, an 82% increase from the same time last year when users were spending just over three hours on social networking sites. In addition, the overall traffic to social networking sites has grown over the last three years."

The rest of the data is equally as stunning. Social networks and blogs are now the most popular online category when ranked by average time spent in December 2009, distantly followed by online games and instant messaging. 

Twitter is proving to be the dark horse that, while rather far behind the Facebook behemoth, might just catch up enough to give a strong showing. Average time on Twitter increased a jaw-dropping 368% in 2009! Twitter increased its number of unique visitors by 579%, from 2.7 million unique visitors in December 2008 to 18.1 million in December 2009. 

Globally, spending time on social networking sites is becoming almost synonymous with spending time on the Internet. However, Nielsen's vision of "global" probably isn't congruent with the average person's definition - it only takes into account data from U.S., U.K., Australia, Brazil, Japan, Switzerland, Germany, France, Spain and Italy. Vast and distinctive demographics of the online world, including all of Africa and virtually all of Asia, are not included in this study.

Even with the caveat of the definition of global, the Nielsen data is backing up a central hypothesis behind YouJustGetMe: when social media aligns with human nature, it is an explosive success.