Facebook is rapidly growing, back in April 2009 they had 200 million users, now they have over 400 million active users. More than 50% of these users log on to their Facebook accounts every day and I’m sure there’s a large number of people who log on several times a day. Well it seems these figures are really starting to make an impact on web traffic trends.
For the first time in history, the world’s largest social networking site managed to surpass Google in terms of web traffic.
According to the research firm, Hitwise – Facebook accounted for 7.07 percent of visits in the week ended March 13, topping Google.com’s 7.03 percent.
Facebook has managed to triple the number of visits to its site compared to last year. Google on the other hand has only managed to see a 9% growth in its traffic figures.
Now bear in mind that Facebook hasn’t completely wiped Google off the number one spot because they have multiple other branches of their main site Google.com like Google.ca, Google.co.uk, Google.ie etc…. and if we look at the top 20 sites we see several of these are in there.
Facebook easily beats all the other social networks out there, with the nearest competitors being Twitter and My Space who just about make the top 20 sites.
Google obviously see Facebook as a threat since they recently announced Google Buzz to try and get in on the whole social networking scene but it doesn’t appear to have taken off too well. It’s now reported that Google are working on a separate version of Buzz that’s not incorporated into Gmail in another attempt to put a dent in Facebook.
But for now I don’t see that happening any time soon but it will be interesting to see how the next few months pan out and if Facebook can retain the number one spot or is this just a once off occurrence.
Hard to believe Facebook was founded by a university student back in 2004 when you look at how successful it is today.
