2010 will be remembered as the year of Facebook, not just for the news, publicity and movie surrounding the social network’s creators but also for Facebook’s exceptional growth and development.
In March 2010 Facebook had the exciting news, that for the first week ever they had surpassed Google in the U.S as the number one web site. However, unfortunately Facebook were unable to hold onto this crown.
Further good news was to follow for the social network giants in July, when Facebook celebrated their 500 millionth user.
Their remarkable growth continued to excel into October ‘10, when they revealed that from October 2009 in the U.S, when the site had 97.37 million U.S unique visitors to October 2010. They had experienced a growth of 53.76 million unique users. Bringing Facebook users to a staggering 151.13 million, and a growth rate of 55.2% year-over-year for Facebook in the United States.
However, the good times we not set to stop there or even slow down after this remarkable achievement. During the Web. 2.0 Summit earlier this month CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg, had even more good news. He claimed that out of the 500 million users currently on Facebook, half of those members visit Facebook on a daily basis. A fact which he largely put down to the growth in next generation mobiles and the success of the Facebook App.
During 2010 Facebook did not solely experience increases in users and frequency of visits. Mashable and Omniture revealed that that the social network also experienced markable growth in time spent on the sight by its users. They reported that users in October 2009 were spending 17,840 million minutes on Facebook, whereas in October 2010 users were spending a total of 42,578 million minutes on the site, “that’s a growth of 72.1 percent.”
Last week Hitwise had even more news illustrating the success of 2010 for Facebook. Research carried out by Hitwise showed that Facebook pages accounted for one in every four page views in the U.S. and 10% of all internet visits.
The Hitwise’s report suggested that Facebook could be on the verge of overtaking Google once again in the battle for internet supremacy. Hitwise claim that in the past week Facebook experienced 5 times more page views and 3% more web visits than Google, placing them firmly in number one. However it should be noted that other sources have shown different results in the battle between Google.
Hitwise’s put these exceptional findings into context, comparing Facebook to other social networks. They explain that Facebook currently holds a market share of 24.27%. This market share is almost four times as much as their nearest rival MySpace.
Facebook have continually revamped and created products through 2010 to ensure repeat use and 2011 appears no different. Most recently Facebook managed the successful penetration of a highly saturated market with Facebook Places. In 2011 they look set to do the same with the high profile launch of Facebook Messages, which Zuckerberg proclaimed to be the company’s fastest-growing product yet, and a direct challenge to the dominance of Google.
It appears no surprise that Facebook has experienced such a successful year. However, perhaps more exceptionally it does not appear that they will experience any major slump in their growth and usage in the foreseeable future. This provides remarkable opportunities for businesses to tap in to, which in return can only help Facebook maintain these unprecedented rates.
Mashable Asks perhaps the most interesting question on the future of Facebook as they look into a new year, “what the still-young company will do to keep these numbers growing in 2011?”
