According to a recent study by comScore, 75.8% of women across the globe have visited a social networking site in the month of May, 2010. That should be around 3 billion people taken from the estimated 7 billion people now living on this planet. This accounts for 47.9% of the overall unique visitors, consuming 57% of pages, and around 57% of total time spent on social network sites.

Men on the other hand are behind with 69.7% saying they have visited a social networking site on the same time period. Women also spend longer hours on social networks clocking in 5.5 hours each month on average compared to the 3.9 hours for men.

Continent wise, around 94.1% of Latin American women do social networking compared to the 91.9% of their men leading all continents. North America then follows with 91% and 87.5% social network reach for women and men respectively.

85.6% of European women and 80.6% of their men have visited these sites while Asians only contributed 54.9% of women and 50.7% of respectively. Analysts say that the poor representation coming from the Asia Pacific region is largely due to the low access to broadband connection.

On another note, homosexuals and heterosexuals appears to have a rather significant gap in social networking activity in the United States with 55% of homosexuals saying they have visited a social networking site daily while only 41% of heterosexuals report the same.

Enform believes that this sort of segmenting is valuable for exporters and marketers in general allowing for appropriate adjustments basing on the demographics of your target market. However, the average number of hours committed to social media might be a wake-up call overall for some.

More than 20 billion searches are done worldwide each month. According to the June 2010 rankings done by ComScore, 16.4 billion searches have been done in the US alone and 62.6% of this number went to Google.

Google’s “closest” competitors, Yahoo and Microsoft, managed a modest increase of 0.6% with 18.9% and 12.7% respectively. Ask stayed firm at 3.6% and AOL dipped very slightly with 2.2% compared to its 2.3% share of the previous month.

comScore Core Search Report*
June 2010 vs. May 2010
Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations
Source: comScore qSearch
Core Search Entity Share of Searches (%)
May-10 Jun-10 Point Change Jun-10 vs. May-10
Total Core Search 100.0% 100.0% N/A
Google Sites 63.7% 62.6% -1.1
Yahoo! Sites 18.3% 18.9% 0.6
Microsoft Sites 12.1% 12.7% 0.6
Ask Network 3.6% 3.6% 0.0
AOL LLC Network 2.3% 2.2% -0.1

Although Google is still leaps ahead of the pack, it should be noted that Microsoft’s league of search sites, MSN, Windows Live, and Bing, have been on a roll for nearly a year now growing 50% compared with its share in searches on the same month of last year.

An even more interesting fact is that Microsoft’s bigger piece of the pie came at the expense of its now “search ally” Yahoo since Google’s market share only budged 1.7% on the same period. If the trend continues, Microsoft could eat up Yahoo’s share in the coming years although what remains to be seen is how it could take a greater share from Google. This should be one of the more interesting things to watch in the coming years.

For now, since Google’s in control, Enform believes its best to continue to focus most internet marketing efforts in pleasing the internet’s clear search leader. This means carefully following its set guidelines in increasing search rankings while taking advantage of their paid advertising mediums if needed. However, marketers must keep in mind that Microsoft and Yahoo’s tag team is just around the corner and need to be considered.

Source: http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2010/7/comScore_Releases_June_2010_U.S._Search_Engine_Rankings/%28language%29/eng-US

FaceBook might have the edge in user base however, it’s the advertisement-free Wikipedia that earned big among American customers. According to the 2010 American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), Wikidepia was ahead of FaceBook, Youtube, and Myspace with a score of 77 while the rest had 64, 73, and 63 respectively.

The key to Wikipedia’s higher marks apparently lies in its ease of use and the completeness of information freely available to its users, who by the way only visit the site every week with some going to it monthly – nowhere near the 57% mark of FaceBook users that use it daily. Surprisingly enough, there are only two things that Americans see negatively for Wikipedia. One of these is the apparent user-generated content which can naturally be of questionable credibility. The rest when asked about what they don’t like about the site said they have nothing they think they don’t like about it.

FaceBook’s users on the other hand had a handful of nays with security and privacy concerns leading the way. This is then followed by news feeds, the presence of ads, never-ending interface tweaks, difficulty in navigation, less-than-lovable applications that can’t stop sending out notifications, overall functionality, and of course, spam.

Surprisingly, regardless of the faults that the American consumers see on FaceBook, it still remains too popular to ignore. Can you imagine 9% of the entire American website visits go to it? And among all the social networking sites out there, 55% of Americans use it. If you factor in nearly 500 million users, could it be that the unsatisfied users are only normal given such an overwhelming user base?

Enform believes this is exactly the case and no matter the downsides mentioned, at the right hands, FaceBook and other social media sites’ influence especially among the younger adults (50% of 18-34 year olds find social media recommendations to be most influential in their buying decision) should not be ignored. Give us a call and we’ll take care of sifting through all of the negatives social media sites has to offer to get directly to your target audience.

Source: http://www.marketingcharts.com/direct/facebook-earns-poor-customer-satisfaction-marks-13614/