Social media &
Facebook More Visited Than Google
Filed under: Facebook, Google, Social Media, Surveys and stats
Everything social is what people want to do most. Currently the top site is still Google but it will pass. People love to talk more than search. If we look at the top sites in US for 2009 then we see that four of them are used for communicating with others (Yahoo Mail, Facebook, MySpace and Live Mail). I believe that this social chatter is fundamental human need and won’t go away any time soon.
As we pointed out in our 22 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2010, people will use more social networks’ messaging instead of regular email and IM. This will boost the visits to the social sites and decrease the usage of web mail. This all leads to Facebook becoming the most visited site in the world some time in 2010.
Experian Hitwise US tweeted that:
Facebook was the most visited site in the US on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. 1st time the site has been the #1 visited US site ever. — Hitwise_US
Search Engine Land has a Hitwise graph for the data running up to the Christmas.
Experian Hitwise UK shared their data:
Facebook was the #1 US website this Xmas. Not quite there in the UK yet – maybe next year… — Hitwise_UK
I think there are two factors holding back total domination of Facebook. Lack of news and god-awful search. If Facebook would integrate Bing search to its platform then Google would have a lot to worry about.
Posted on: December 30, 2009
One could say that it was just one-off – even I used Facebook more than Google at Christmas!
Well, if you extrapolate the UK’s trends then it’ll take about 10 months to put Facebook permanently ahead of Google.
Probably facebook will pass google. But I think google has no reason to worry because of that. The amount of information in internet is still growing, which means the need for search does not disappear and google is the specialist on that field. Google does not compete with facebook. Google is not loosing users. Facebook is taking the users from other internet sites which are trying to give communication possibilities and entertainment.
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@Siim, I agree, people are popping in and saying “merry christmas” and making plans with friends from back home to catch up while home for the holidays.
Any comparison between these two is relatively useless. It’s like saying that dryers are beating TVs for energy use in the home now. What does that tell you other than the fact that TVs are becoming more energy friendly? Nothing really.
I don’t use google to talk with friends and I don’t use facebook to search for answers.
I don’t think bing (or google) integration will really help anyone *that* much because people don’t go to facebook when they want to search. It could have an impact because if you are already in facebook you would have the box right there, but I don’t think it would be game-changing in any way.
@covati on twitter
People will have social networks as their start page. People don’t go to Facebook to search, they are already there and wouldn’t leave if they could use the built-in search.
You can’t use Google to talk to your friends (Yes, I know about Orkut, Gmail, Wave, etc). You can use Facebook to search. I admit it sucks and it doesn’t give you web results, but it is a search.
So when people start to use most of their web time in social media sites it is only logical to include web results. At first it seems to be bad business for Facebook to send away users, but the alternative would be they that they will go to Google for search. It is a very good opportunity for Bing/Microsoft/Facebook to undermine Google’s core business.
I believe that Microsoft/Facebook can get much more out of it than just trying to compete with Google on pure search.
In some sense, Facebook can grab some traffic from Google. As the number of commercial Pages is vastly growing in FB, services and customer interaction moves to social networks instead of “googleable” websites.
From FB and Pages you can find objective data and reviews about products and services. FB is still quite non-spammed – not that much of black hat crap, compared with Google’s results. Real reviews from real people. If my friend recommends a restaurant over FB, I would reall look forward visiting it. FB’s key success factor in terms of search is to manage its clean and objective content.
Therefore FB might become a start for objective information search.
Thanks Siim. Very good point about interaction moving to FB.
Other than that, we see social media results included in Google. But in those terms FB has a lot more insight about why these conversations happen. Google can only guess the relationship between posters.
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“If Facebook would integrate Bing search to its platform then Google would have a lot to worry about.”
….Is it safe to say that Google should be worried now?
Google has a very delicate situation here and Facebook can do a lot of damage to their business through eroding their search dominance and advertising income.
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