Facebook is a must-visit site for billions of individuals around the world every day, with many squeezing in time during a busy work day, family event and night out to check their Facebook “news feed.” And on special occasions, like Christmas or, most recently, Valentine’s Day,
Facebook use may reach an all-time high as users take to the social media site to update their statuses or declare their affection for a loved one.
While a lot of coveted Facebook time is spent sitting in front of the desktop, Facebook use is also getting just as big in the mobile world, according to a recent report from comScore, which evaluated United Kingdom users’ habits.
Facebook's 7.5 million unique mobile users spent an average of 2,500 million minutes on its site in December of 2010, according to a chart posted on Business Insider. Other sites, including Google and eBay, couldn’t even hold a candle to Facebook with regards to mobile use, as Google came in second with its 9.5 million users spending just 702 million minutes on Google through their phones in December. The list was rounded out by Yahoo, AccuWeather, Microsoft, BBC, Vodafone, Samsung, Orange and eBay sites, respectively.
So what do these statistics tell us about our friends in the U.K.? That they seem to be just like every other Facebook user in the world.
The facts speak for themselves: Facebook users are made up of a group of narcissistic, overly open people (myself included, of course) who think that everyone in the Facebook stratosphere wants to know their every move. They, likewise, want to know everyone else’s every move.
Does this make us bad people? Of course not, but it also demonstrates that lately many of us possess this compulsive need to know what is going on in our friends’ lives at any given time. Whether it is “stalking” an ex- boyfriend or girlfriend on Facebook to see if they are dating someone new, seeing how someone’s birthday party went or reading your friends up-to-the-minute statuses to see how their morning commute, lunch and job went, users want to constantly glean into other people’s lives.
In March 2009, Nielsen Online released a report called “Global Faces and Networked Places” that revealed that social networking sites, like Facebook, are used much more than e-mail as a primary means of communication.
On the Nielsen Wire blog, the company wrote: "Two-thirds of the world's Internet population visit social networking or blogging sites, accounting for almost 10 percent of all Internet time."
According to the social media king himself, Facebook, 50 percent of active users log on to Facebook in any given day and people spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook. And for those who can’t spend those precious minutes sitting in chair using their computer, they are relying on their phones to get their Facebook fix filled.
So what lesson can we learn from comScore’s recent fact that 2,500 million minutes are spent a month using a phone to access Facebook? Turn the cell off.
Carrie Schmelkin is a Web Editor for TechZone360. Previously, she worked as Assistant Editor at the New Canaan Advertiser, a 102-year-old weekly newspaper, covering news and enhancing the publication's social media initiatives. Carrie holds a bachelor's degree in journalism and a bachelor's degree in English from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.Edited by
Carrie Schmelkin