Most would probably agree that 2012 has been the coming out party for social networking. Sure, Facebook has been popular for many years after it trumped MySpace but more recent entrants have played a huge part in shaping how people spend their time online.
A new study from Nielsen confirms these beliefs by and large. Their Social Media report found that people spend more time on social media websites or networks than any other type of site on the web. According to the data, consumers spend about 20 percent of the time on their PC using social media. That percentage jumps up to 30 when discussing mobile phone use.
Year over year, people spent about 37 percent more time on social media this past summer than they did during the same time last year. In the US alone, that translated to roughly 121 billion minutes in July versus 88 billion minutes in July 2011.
Not surprisingly, Facebook remains the most popular social media destination for yet another year. Blogger, Twitter and Wordpress also ranked pretty high in the PC visitor category but it was Pinterest that saw the biggest yearly change. The new social site had a year over year change of 1,047 percent. Comparatively, unique visitors to Twitter only increased by 13 percent while Google+ saw an 80 percent increase year to year.
Pinterest saw an even larger increase on the mobile side where unique visitors increased a whopping 4,225 percent. The next closest in that list was Tumblr at 162 percent followed by Twitter at 140 percent.