Social networks are exploding in popularity. Forty-three percent of the online community – or 85 million people (38 percent of adult population) – use to some degree at least one social networking sites, such as Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn. This represents an increase of 60 percent from just one year ago. And this universe is growing considerably every day.

About half of this large social networking group – or 42 million – logs on daily. Most users (65 percent) log on at home, one-fourth when at work, and 10 percent via web-enabled phone. Connecting with friends, family and maybe celebrities is among the main reasons people log on to sites like Twitter. According to the Consumer Internet Barometer, the top four SocNet sites are Facebook (78 percent), MySpace (42 percent), LinkedIn (17 percent) and Twitter (10 percent).

Although Twitter.com is a social website, the activity is often under-reported as Twitter is really a tool which many have downloaded onto phones or blogsites to relay short messages to followers/friends.

The SoctNet webworld is not limited to the big four. Here is a list compiled by one research company:

More information gleaned from a recent Harris Interactive Survey:

Other findings from Harris Interactive:

• 74 percent of those aged 18-34 years old have a Facebook or MySpace account, but this drops to 24% for those adults over age 55.
• Twitter users are much fewer with only 5 percent of online adults subscribers participating.
• By gender, women are more “social”. However, men show a preference for the Twitter – shorter messages.
• Education differences are interesting: Those having attended or graduated from college are 30 percent more likely to be part of this social media universe.
• Approximately 16 percent update their pages daily (about 14 million).

Now let’s look at a recently released study by Workplace Media of working adults – more often our target market. It found that 55 percent maintained at least one social networking account. Of those respondents, 43 percent reported accessing their social networking accounts at work, and 78 percent reported spending less than 30 minutes per day on their site(s).

The survey found that 89 percent of social net users are on Facebook, 40 percent on MySpace, 31 percent on LinkedIn and 18 percent on Twitter.

The conclusion is that working adults have a much higher participation in the SocNet world than the general population.

From Nielsen-Online.com the recent report shows the significant change in unique audience over one year – June’08 to June ’09:

Top Online Member Communities Destinations Ranked by Unique Audience – Persons 2+:

• For all U.S. websites, Facebook now ranks as the sixth most popular. Visitors spent an average of 4 hours and 33 minutes on the site in June.

• Twitter has broken through the top 50 U.S. websites and is now ranked 46^th. The average time per person on Twitter was 31 minutes in June, 2009.

As we track this growth of the social networking communities, it becomes evident that the group over age 45, or the Baby Boomers, represent the recent joiners. This is of particular interest to many marketers who target the billions spent by these 100 million consumers.

Jeremiah K. Owyang, a senior analyst with Forrester Research, which just published another report on this growing phenomenon, stated: “It’s a clear indicator that social technologies (communities) are here to stay.”