Facebook is King?

Being an active user of both Facebook (more) and MySpace (less), I wondered which social networking platform truly is "king". Personally, I started out as MySpace'er hestitant to jump ship to Facebook, but within the last few months my use of Facebook has literally doubled, perhaps tripled. It has become my go-to for status updates on my own behalf, checking in on my friends around the country and photo sharing. On the contrary, I find my use of MySpace has dwindled significantly to the point of a check-in every few days (vs. my multiple logins per day in my Facebook account). In addition, and not be overlooked, Twitter is rapidly climbing the social networking ladder with considerable growth. I have yet to formulate an opinion of Twitter, one way or another. With all these channels, its difficult to keep up, let alone understand who is using what.

I consulted a few sites in online research and have found the following data:

Facebook

• 150 million people around the world (36 million in the US) are now actively using Facebook and almost half of them are using Facebook every day. Source: Mark Zuckerberg, Jan 7, 2009
• Facebook has 54.5 million monthly unique visitors, says Comscore, with a growth rate in the U.S. averaged 3.8% per month over the last year. Source, Comscore via Techncrunch, Jan 13, 2009

MySpace

• 76 million members in MySpace US alone, with a U.S. growth rate of 0.8% per month Comscore via Techncrunch, Jan 13, 2009

Twitter

• According to Compete, the growth rate for Twitter was 752%, for a total of 4.43 million unique visitors in December 2008, in the start of 2008, Twitter had only around 500,000 unique monthly visitors. Source: Mashable/Compete, Jan 9, 2009

To truly compared apples to apples, MySpace still dominated the US landscape with users but Facebook overshadows MySpace's clout with it's international audience which combined with its US market outshines the MySpace crown. At its current rate of growth, Facebook should catch up to MySpace in around four years within the US market. However, both sites report similar (worldwide) unique visitors each month at approximately 115 million.

Social networking data compiled by "Web Strategies by Jeremiah" (2009)