"Facebook" Most Popular Search Term in U.S. Social Networking in April

“Facebook” was the most popular search term within Hitwise’s Computers and Internet – Social Networking and Forums industry in the U.S. in April, representing 10.62% of all searches, market research firm Experian Hitwise said.

Overall, Facebook was predominant, as “facebook login” took second place at 5.11% and “facebook.com” came in 5th. Standing at third place was “youtube” at 4.70% and fourth “myspace” at 4.23%.

Top 10 social social networking sites and forums
“87.16% of all visits to the online ‘Computers and Internet – Social Networking and Forums’ industry went to the top 10 websites for the month of April, 2010. 89.27% went to the top 20 websites and 94.44% went to the top 100 websites”, market research firm Experian Hitwise said in its latest report.

Twitter ranks among the top five but surprisingly enough, only made it to the 4th place behind youtube and Myspace. The top five were: Facebook with a 53.57% share, YouTube with 15.32%, MySpace with 13.12%, Twitter with 1.09% and Tagged with 0.96%.

This category contains websites and forums which facilitate online communication and networking via profile pages. This can include sites where users are linked through regional/social groups or specific interests, as well as more general online networks. The total number of websites that ranked with currently selected options was 7,094, representing a category contribution percentage of 13.89%.

Upstream traffic from search engines
Search engines referred an average 25.14% of upstream traffic to the ‘Computers and Internet – Social Networking and Forums’ online industry over the past six months, down 4.78% compared to the overall internet average of 29.93%.

First, and accounting for 18.74% was Google. Far second was Yahoo! Search at 2.44%, Bing was third at 2.26%, Google Images fourth at 0.46% and Ask fifth at a mere 0.30%.

Downstream traffic from search engines
Downstream traffic to search engines from the ‘Computers and Internet – Social Networking and Forums’ online industry was 13.05%, up 2.65% from the internet average of 10.40%.

Again, Google topped the first five search engines at 10.28%. Yahoo! Search scored 1.03%, Bing 0.95%, Google Images 0.30% and Ask 0.23%.

Dwell time
Average dwell time of visitors to the online ‘Computers and Internet – Social Networking and Forums’ industry was 22 minutes, 39 seconds – slight decrease from an average visit duration of 22 minutes, 42 seconds in the previous months.
Dwell time is considered by Microsoft’s Bing as the ultimate KPI for measuring social media and ad campaign ROI.

Fast movers
Some local websites have sky rocketed in the four months ending April, 2010. The biggest gainers were Dungeons and Dragons Online, an online forum dedicated to the game, up 1649 places, and India Target, which carries a range of news and information about Bollywood, as well as interactive features including forums and polls, up 1,585 places.