YouTube, Wikipedia, Facebook: Most Popular Social Media Sites in UK

Facebook lives! Reports of Facebook UK’s death? Greatly exaggerated.

Rocketing up the charts in today’s Nielsen social search Top 10 is Facebook, up 712 percent year-over-year. Facebook leapfrogged 15 places in the most popular social media site rankings, winning third place with 8.5 million UK visitors.

YouTube, Facebook and Slide.com top the list of the most popular and fastest growing social media Web sites in the UK, according to Nielsen Online, a service of The Nielsen Company. Nielsen’s data, released today, proves that reports of social media’s demise in the UK may be unfounded.

In the UK, 20.8 million people (63 percent of Britons online) visited at least one of the ten most popular social media sites in January 2008. That’s a 21 percent increase over last January (17.1 million).

YouTube has replaced Wikipedia as the UK’s most popular social media Web site.

Biggest Winners: Facebook and social networking add-on tool, Slide.

Biggest Losers: Friends Reunited and Google Video.

Facebook and Slide broke into the Top 10 by ousting Friends Reunited and Google Video (falling to 16 and 14, respectively, compared to January 2007).

Prediction: Google will retire the Google Video brand and roll it into YouTube by the end of 2008. Both are video search engines. Universal search makes Google Video as a standalone property obsolete.

RIP Google Video: the first Top 20 Web property buried six feet under the World Wide Web?

We’ll be tracking whether UK cable TV (MTV Two) can drive traffic and registrations to a social media site. MySpace (News Corp) and MTV (Viacom) will launch a weekly TV music video countdown show (MySpace Chart) only on the U.K. network MTV Two, not to be confused with MTV 2 in the US.

Think TRL with a social twist.

MySpacers and MTV site visitors will be able to vote next week on the top videos (mtv.co.uk/myspacechart) on MySpace and MTV Two’s dedicated landing page.

My Space Chart launch date: March 16. Mark you calendars and start tracking on comScore, Hitwise, and Nielsen.

A complete list of the current MTV Two UK chart toppers after the jump:

The MTV TWO Chart:

Arcade Fire – Black Mirror
Cage The Elephant – In One Ear
Does It Offend You Yeah – Let’s Make Out
Editors – Push Your Head Towards The Air
Elbow – Grounds For Divorce
Foals – Cassius
Furtureheads – Beginning Of The Twist
Guillemots – Get Over It
Hard Fi – I Shall Overcome
Hot Chip – Ready For The Floor
I Was A Cub Scout – Pink Squares
Jack Penate – Have I Been A Fool
Jimmy Eat World – Always Be
Joe Lean & The Jing Jang Jong – Lonely Buoy
Kaiser Chiefs – Heat Dies Down
Kids In Glass Houses – Easy Tiger
Late Of The Pier – Bears Are Coming
Look See Proof – Do You Think Its right
Make Model – The LSB
MGMT – Time To Pretend
Mystery Jets Ft. Laura Marling – Young Love
One Night Only – Just For Tonight
Panic At The Disco – Nine In The Afternoon
Radiohead – Nude
Red Jump Suit Apparatus – Face Down
REM – Supernatural Superserious
Supergrass – Bad Blood
The Courteeners – Not Nineteen Foerver
The Cribs – I’m A Realist
The Enemy – This Song Is About You
The Kooks – Always Where I Need To Be
The Metros – Education
The Teenagers – Love No
The Wombats – Moving To New York
Vampire Weekend – A Punk
We Are Scientists – After Hours
Young Knives – Up All Night