Facebook’s market share of UK internet visits to All Categories increased to 2.01% in December. The social networking website accounted for one in every fifty UK internet visits in the last month of 2007, with its market share peaking on Christmas Day. As the chart below illustrates, Facebook’s market share has increased 10-fold over the past 12 months.

Our custom category of the top 25 social networks also peaked over Christmas, and accounted for one in every 14 UK internet visits on the big day. Even more significantly, as the social networks’ market share has increased, so has their capacity to deliver traffic to other sites. Social networks accounted for 7.04% of upstream traffic to All Categories in December. As the table below illustrates, facebook.com, bebo.com and myspace.com were all included in the top 10 individual URLs sending traffic to other websites last month.

This all goes to prove that 2008 will be an even bigger year for social networks than 2007, and that companies, governments and NGOs all need strategies in place to take advantage of this growth. Fortunately help is at hand, as we have just published a report on this very topic. Our new White Paper, The Impact of Social Networking in the UK, looks at the growth of social networks, including analysis of who's really using social networking websites, as well as our predictions for the impact they will have in 2008. The paper also features insight from our colleagues at Experian Integrated Marketing on how marketers should look to build their 2008 social media marketing strategies.

You can download a copy of the report here.

Robin Goad

Robin Goad is Research Director, Hitwise UK. This piece was originally published on Hitwise analyst blog here.