Myspace bucks the social networking trend... and tanks...

The growth of social networking sites over the past year has been significant, according to Nielson Australian users spent 1.6 Million hours on Facebook and Twitter in June 2009, this is a 100% increase from June last year! According to Hitwise Facebook’s market share has increased 101% and Twitter’s grew by 1516% in the past year!

Twitters phenomenal growth in particular has impressed many social networkers and media analysts. Whilst blogging has been a successful online marketing strategy for some years, a micro-blogging service such as Twitter offers an additional feature set particularly of interest to some community and market segments. These groups have driven the growth of Twitter and include Political entities, marketing groups and even celebrities are using twitter to be closer to their fans. Industry groups have also adapted to industry groups, lawyers, media professionals, etc

Facebook has also continued its steady growth, with the addition most notably of Facebook connect Facebook has sought to promote its integration with third-party websites through the delivery of a rich toolset which improve the user experience and deliver an easy social networking functionality for users.

Myspace however with its poor usability and slow page load times has managed to lose more than half its market share. Not surprisingly to some Myspace has stagnated and failed to perform in line with its social networking peers after Facebook secured its spot as the #1 social networking site in April last year.

The next year is likely to be at least at turbulent as the last; particularly with new players like Google Wave entering the scene.