Facebook has overtaken Google as the most popular website in the United States this month, scoring more visits to its home page than the search engine giant.
In the week ending 13 March, the two sites combined accounted for 14 per cent of all internet visits in the US, with Facebook having a slight lead over Google with 7.07 per cent of the visits compared with 7.03 per cent for Google.
This is the first time that Facebook has achieved such a lead over the course of a whole week.
The figures, released this week from Hitwise, will delight those at Facebook HQ who have been looking for ways to capitalise on the site’s huge popularity. Membership of the site around the world has more than doubled over the last year, and now stands at over 400 million users.
Facebook Advertising
So far, the social networking site has struggled to appease advertisers, with Facebook advertising not reaching its potential, but moves towards more targeted advertising on the site are in progress, with geolocation sharing due to be launched within the next few weeks which will allow businesses to target relevant users with advertising.
Facebook has also just added autosearch to its search tab, which offers possibilities ascertained from connections a user has on the site, such as pages users’ friends are fans of, in a bid to become more searchable.
It’s a wake-up call to marketers that despite the horrendously annoying applications such as Farmville and Mafia Wars, Facebook is beginning to dominate. A year ago, the site only accounted for 2 per cent of internet visits, so has seen more than a 300 per cent increase, and it’s a sure sign that the web is becoming just as sociable as it is searchable, if not more so.
Google’s latest attempt to snare its share of the social networking market came last month with the launch of Buzz, which allows users to add status updates as well as friends, pictures and comments.
But it was bad news in general for search giant Google this month when it suffered a second month of straight decline in search market share, with new rival, Microsoft’s Bing, enjoying two solid months of growth with an all-time high of 12.5 per cent of market share.
The Facebook/Google race however does not take into account other Google services such as Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube or searches undertaken in a browser toolbar box.
Related posts: