What Nobody Thought Would Happen: Social Media Beats Out Search for Top Web Activity

by: iCopywriter Senior Editor, Heather Price-Wright

To almost no one’s surprise, social media has become the undisputed belle of the online ball. According to a May 2011 Nielsen report, social media has beat out search, as well as all other categories, as the activity Web users spend the most time participating in. Nielsen reports that one in every four online minutes is spent using social media.

Also to no one’s surprise, Facebook is the ruling force in social media. In May, Americans spent a staggering 53.5 billion minutes on the site from work and personal computers. And in all likelihood, that number is much smaller than the actual time spent on Facebook - Nielsen also found that almost 40% of users access social media sites by way of their smart phones. Compared to those numbers, the time spent on sites primarily devoted to searching was paltry. Even fellow giant Google saw just 17.2 million minutes in May - still a substantial number, but nowhere near Facebook’s dominating performance.

Of course, it’s only logical that users would spend more time on social media than search sites. After all, the whole point of searching is to be led elsewhere on the Web, whereas social media sites are designed so that users stick around for at least a few minutes. And that, experts argue, might be the model to follow for all websites, from search engines to social media to business and personal sites.

#1 TIP TO PROMOTING YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA PRESENCE??

Rhadha Subramanyam, senior VP of media and advertising insight and analytics at Nielsen, notes that one of the biggest mistakes companies can make is separating their search, social and other media departments when it comes to marketing and advertising. She adds that when social media is made its own department, “it tends to get buried.”

So instead of having different teams managing and overseeing different aspects of your overall marketing push, the Nielsen results point to a better way: integrating social media, search engine marketing, content creation and other online marketing strategies into a cohesive campaign that catches users’ eyes on a variety of platforms, bringing them to your company’s site.

What are YOUR social media strategies?

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