Brits love to social network but businesses fail to take notice

It's official - social networking is the UK's favourite online activity.

This is hardly a surprise, in fact to many it'll be more of a surprise that it's only been announced now, but figures from web monitoring firm Experian Hitwise found that sites like Facebook accounted for 12.46 per cent of all internet traffic in January.

This surpasses the 12.18 per cent of traffic to entertainment sites in the same month, the first time the two categories have traded positions (see image below).

The figures are all the more impressive because it underlines the huge growth social networking sites have seen in the past few years, with visits rising from eight per cent of all hits in March 2008 to over 2.4 billion visits in January 2011.

Facebook, unsurprisingly, was the dominant social network in the UK, claiming 56 per cent of all hits. However, users rarely went to just one social network, Experian said, while the average session for a user was 22 minutes.

While this is great news for Facebook, Twitter et al, businesses are failing to take advantage of this growth, it seems, as just 16 per cent of all referral links from social networks are sent to transactional web sites.

As it is, search engines still dominate in this space, with 33 per cent of all searches leading to such web sites and research director at Experian Hitwise, Robin Goad, said that firms needed to embrace the new opportunities on offer.

"Transactional web sites - those selling goods or services such as travel or insurance online - still rely primarily on search for their traffic and therefore sales," he said.

"Successful transactional web sites will be those that learn to harness the power of social networks, driving traffic through to their own websites."

Businesses can't claim they're not provided for either - on Monday IBM announced a new Smarter Commerce initiative that aims to give firms the ability to generate more revenue and improve feedback based on interactions with social sites.

With UK internet users spending more time on these web sites than anything else, businesses can't afford to ignore the potential on offer any longer.

Source: Experian Hitwise

17 Mar 2011