Seeing huge growth from 2009

May 5, 2010 12:51 GMT  ·  By

Social networking has been around for quite a few years, but 2009 was most likely the year that it truly went mainstream, taking over the web in the process. Social networking is currently dominated by two sites, Facebook, obviously, and Twitter. According to new numbers from Nielsen, both social networks saw huge gains in users in the past year in the US, while everyone else lost visitors.

Facebook saw a 70-percent jump in visitors in the US from March 2009 to the same month this year. Considering that almost 70 million Americans were flocking into Facebook a year ago, today’s growth and total numbers, 117 million in March 2010, are even more impressive.

Interestingly, Nielsen noticed a dip in visitors in March after Facebook reached a record 119 million unique visitors from the US in February. This small decrease is likely just a ‘glitch’ and isn’t the beginning of a trend.

The social network won’t keep on growing forever, though, there are only about 230 million Internet users in the US, a number that seems within the reach of Facebook, based on its growth so far. At the very least, it is highly likely that Facebook.com will become the biggest site in the US and in the world in the not-so-distant future.

Twitter, which saw an explosive growth last spring, is actually fairing worse, in year-over-year growth. The site is estimated to have attracted a little over 20 million visitors in the US in March 2010. Despite being significantly smaller than Facebook, it’s growth was of only 45 percent, rising from about 14 million visitors in the same period in 2009.

According to Twitter’s own numbers, though, it is doing much better globally. The site has well over 100 million users around the world and many of them don’t utilize the site to connect. That’s registered users, it gets significantly more visitors per month. Twitter says 180 million people employ the service in one form or another every month.