14 DAY TRIAL // Despite being the largest social network in the world, by a fair margin, Facebook continued to grow in June in the US with a healthy 8.45 percent rise in unique visitors. MySpace, the second largest social network in the world and in the US, having been recently overtaken by Facebook in the country, started to pick up last month with a 7.19 percent rise in visitors, while the rising star, Twitter, got 16.57 percent more visitors, according to numbers from Compete.
Facebook continues to dominate, having raked in 122 million unique visitors in June, with a growth that shows no signs of stopping. The numbers add up to a 179 percent increase in the first half of 2009 and a 248 percent rise year over year. While the site has seen a steady growth in the last months, it may be headed for an even bigger visitor number with the recent changes the social network is undergoing – becoming more open and encouraging users to share more content publicly is bound to get even more people to visit the site.
Twitter is starting to pick up the pace again, after a stagnant month in May when it saw just a 1.4 percent growth in visitors, and managed to get almost 23 million unique visitors in the US last month, a 16.57 percent monthly rise. The micro-blogging platform rose an impressive 384 percent just this year and 1,164 percent since June 2008. For a moment it looked like the bubble had burst at Twitter but it now seems it was just temporary, though it will be interesting to see how it will do next month.
Meanwhile, MySpace managed to attract more visitors in June compared to the previous month but has actually fallen 5.65 percent since last year. Acquiring almost 61 million visitors, it is still the second largest social network but only pulling in half the number of people Facebook is getting.
Another interesting thing to note is that most visits to both Twitter and MySpace are coming from facebook.com, followed by google.com or yahoo.com, a clear sign that Facebook is becoming an Internet giant and a major source of traffic rivaling the big search engines. If this trend continues and Facebook is taking serious steps in that direction, Google should start worrying.