Social Networking Stats: Facebook and LinkedIn Surging in US

Some useful social media statistics:

According to Nielsen Online:

“Facebook swelled to 29.2M unique visitors in the US, up more than 10 percent from May. Meanwhile, professional social networking site LinkedIn grew more than 20 percent month-over-month to 9.5M uniques. Year-over-year, that represents 77% growth for Facebook, and 187% for LinkedIn, respectively.

Meanwhile, it would appear that MySpace has officially hit a plateau in the US, though it still more than doubles up on the competition. Its 59.4M visitors in June represented zero growth over last year, and was a marginal decline from the 60.6M reported by Nielsen in May.

Elsewhere, Ning debuts on the charts with 2.2MM unique visitors, up 326% from last year when the create-your-own-social-network site was just getting off the ground.”

Doh! The Technorati Monster Escaped again

If you work in the social media space, the above phrase has probably caused a few gray hairs. Sure – Not a huge headache for the average blogger just logging on check his or her authority, but to those of us that count on public tools like Technorati and Google for reliable data, this “inconvenience,” along with fluctuating standards for how these metrics are computed, is choking the adoption and growth of social media marketing.

The volume of inbound blog links is the layperson’s way of determining influence of a blog. So, calculating this simple metric should be, you know, simple. Right?

Yet, the two public tools used most for blog research, Technorati and Google, keep changing the way they calculate their metrics. Technorati is constantly rejiggering its service, resulting in a frustrating user experience and often-unreliable data. And while that dreaded “Technorati monster” seems to escape more and more every week, earlier this year Google changed its algorithm to weed out paid links – A noble action to be sure, but vexing to social marketers.

Bottom line – Since the measurement of a social media marketing campaign must begin with a benchmark, changes to these basic calculations screw up the measurement. Apples and oranges. All of the sudden employees awake to tell their bosses that their blog now had 20% fewer inbound blog links despite aggressive engagement.

It leaves us with the question of whether the older data was poor, the new data is untrustworthy or whether it is too early to join in social media marketing.

Those of us who pay a lot for data sources don’t have as much of this problem, but a rising tide raises all ships.

Curtis Hougland