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With the announcement of the latest social network statistics by Hitwise & Nielsen-Online this week, it seems to me that the importance of social network marketing is only increasing. Here are three statistics for December 2007 that particularly stood out to me:

• The top 10 social networking sites attracted 131.5 Million unique visitors in the month of December (US only).

• Average time spent by visitors to MySpace and Bebo spent was around 30 minutes for December. Additionally, Facebook visitors spent 20 minutes.

• 95% of the traffic to MySpace in December were returning users. Facebook and Bebo saw 93% and 84% respectively.

For the most part, all of these numbers are significant increases from the same period the previous year (i.e. December 2006) with some of the sites gaining a lot of ground on their competitors.

Why are these three statistics important? They are important because this means that:

1. Social networking sites attract a lot of visitors; and
2. These visitors spend a significant amount of time during their visits; and
3. These visitors keep coming back.

As a marketer this tells me that these social networks are made up of a large, loyal and extremely engaged audience. Ironically, this sounds a lot like what many people used to say about television less than 10 years ago. While TV still has a far bigger audience than any social network today, it tends to be a time shifting, Tivo loving, finger perpetually on the fast forward button audience that has little time or patience to actually watch any commercials.

It’s true that there is always the risk that today’s top social network may become a boring fad tomorrow, but the key message to take away here is that the overall trend of people spending significant amounts of time on social networks seems to be here to stay. After all, we humans spend most of our lives focused on building and extending our formal and informal social networks. After millions of years, being social is pretty much hardwired into our DNA. The internet and online social networks only provide a convenient and easy to use medium for us to increase this social contact. I believe that social networks provide the perfect opportunity for companies to do exactly what people visit these networks for - building and extending relationships. Whether corporations and marketers will be smart and leverage social networks to build lasting relationships with their consumers or try to engage in a far from intelligent, blatantly commercial approach remains to be seen. Only time (and next years advertising statistics) will tell.

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