Last week a colleague pointed out that the share of UK internet searches for "facebook" were tied with those for "myspace". This week, Facebook continued to climb and so overtook MySpace. This means that the volume of UK searches for "facebook" were higher last week than for MySpace. Facebook continues to trail MySpace in visits. Last week, MySpace was 41% larger in share of UK internet visits than Facebook.

But does the metric of search volume matter? Absolutely! The most important reason why this metric matters is that search volume can be a predictive indicator. In May 2006, we predicted that Bebo would overtake MySpace in share of UK internet visits by the start of the school year.

We based this prediction on searches for the brands, growth in weekly and monthly visits, clickstream data and session duration. The most important metric was search data. Bebo overtaking MySpace in share of UK internet searches made it evident that the upstart social network could displace MySpace from the #1 position. Three months later (in August 2006), Bebo overtook MySpace in visits for a few weeks and the two sites remained virtually tied in share of UK internet visits until May 2007, when Bebo overtook MySpace in monthly visits.

The gap in market share of internet visits between Bebo and MySpace and Facebook has been closing rapidly. This is illustrated in the following chart and here are some figures to quantify the change. In the week to 6th January 2007, the gap in the share of visits to MySpace and Facebook was 265%. That was down to 41% last week (week to 14th July 2007). One month ago (week to 16th June) the gap was 92% and three months ago (week to 14th April) the gap was 149%.

Same goes for Bebo. The gap was 221% in market share of UK internet vistis at the start of the year (week to 6th January 2007). Last week, the gap was 64%. One month ago, the difference was 124% and 3 months ago 141%.

Facebook still has a way to go before it catches MySpace or Bebo. Last week, Bebo ranked #6 among All Categories of websites, MySpace ranked #8 and Facebook ranked #11.

Heather Hopkins

Heather Hopkins is VP of Research for Hitwise UK. This piece was first posted on Hitwise Analyst blog here.

Flickr Photo Credit: Maciej Dakowicz