The Rise & Rise of Social Networking

An article about comparing the social networking sites seems pretty useless considering it's probably a well known fact that Facebook takes the crown for the number of unique visitors. Nevertheless, let's see by how much Facebook dominates. And while we're at it, let's analyse the growth and why that is.


The Comparison Between Google+, Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn
Let's make this a bit more interesting...we'll pitch Facebook up against three of the other big social networking sites; Google+, Twitter and LinkedIn. We'll be comparing the number of unique visitors each site has had. To illustrate this, I created a graph (see image 1) - with the help of the software tool, Compete's Site Analytics - which should give us an idea of where each social networking site stands.

Image 1: Rate of unique visitors to Facebook (blue), LinkedIn (red), Google+ (green) & Twitter (purple).

Well...no surprises there. Facebook (blue) clearly takes the award however it's more erratic than say LinkedIn (in the ugly green colour). And Twitter (red) as well, is erratic...Google+ on the other hand are just starting & are still at an infant stage which explains the fairly straight line at the bottom. 

How has the growth in these social networks changed?
'User Engagement' are the key words here. The main strategies for social networks, according to Hazlett (2008) is to get users engaged with its social website and the applications they provide within. Arina (2010) has managed to identify the distinct type of users and the tasks they may perform on all types of social networking sites (image 2 summarises these categories). They are as follows:

• Creators create or perform a lot of blogging, & create video, audio & music.
• Critics are those that give ratings, comments, are frequent users of wikis & do a lot of edit-based work.
• Collectors, Arina (2010) describes as those involved in rss feeds, voting & tagging.
• Joiners are heavily involved in social networking (e.g. use of the mainstream social networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo).
• Spectators are mainly readers of blogs/forums/reviews (Arina, 2010).

Obviously people are not constrained to just one of the categories mentioned above as people tend to cross between two or more of them. But the point of this list above is just to show the many different uses of social networking, and if you're looking at the tasks above you probably didn't know that some of them was a form of social networking. All these things contribute to the growth of social networking. Now you can probably see the 'user engagement' involved in social networking and there's a lot more than you probably realised before you started reading this article.

So to directly ask the question above, 'how has the growth of these social networks changed'...social networks have rapidly grown. They've grown because social networks have turned from the "only talk to a friend via a computer" to "talk to a person, exchange information, photo, videos and audio & create web logs" and distribute all this out to people around the world.

Image 2: The Social ladder of categorical uses for social networking.

What is the cause of these changes?
Another way of looking at this question is to ask "what has caused people to use social networks". The 3 main causes to social networking growth & the change that has occurred throughout its lifetime are listed below.

1. Enhanced Knowledge includes the appropriate distribution of information. It's a great way for experts, in their respective field/s to apply their knowledge for others so that they fill in that 'gap'. This is still a unappreciated domain but is growing through more specialised sites such as Wikipedia, LinkedIn and other similar sites.
2. Basic Human Need to Share; unlike the first point, this second point refers to people who want to share their experience and make their opinions heard. This point is aligned with the basic human nature to share information, videos, photos, audio and friends to other friends. Facebook and Twitter are social sites that best fit this profile.
3. Basic Human Need to Connect...a fundamental social aspect and characteristic that all humans acknowledge and need. This point is the root of all social networking sites. Expanding to other networks of similar interest, geographical roots or just in-difference makes up the need for humans to simply connect to the world (TNL, 2006). 

Reference List:
Arina, T. (2010). Social Networking: Trends & Applications. Retrieved September 1st, 2011 from http://www.slideshare.net/infe/social-networking-trends-and-applications?src=related_normal&rel=973171. 


Hazlett, B. (2008). Social Networking Statistics & Trends. Retrieved September 1st, 2011 from http://www.slideshare.net/onehalfamazing/social-networking-statistics-and-trends-presentation. 


TNL. (2006). 5 Reasons Why Social Networks Can Succeed. Retrieved September 2nd, 2011 from http://www.tnl.net/blog/2006/06/22/5-reasons-why-social-networks-can-succeed/. 


For more information related to this article, check out these sites:
http://blog.compete.com/2010/02/17/we%E2%80%99re-number-two-facebook-moves-up-one-big-spot-in-the-charts/ - Facebook - Moving Up


http://www.tnl.net/blog/2006/06/22/5-reasons-why-social-networks-can-succeed/ - Why Social Networks Can Succeed.