Nielsen is running some nice analysis of April 2009 stats collated by the firm about top social networking sites. Particularly, these stats point to the total minutes that users spent on top social networking sites, time spent on video streams, and the more specific unique visitors composition index for MySpace and Facebook.
According to Nielsen’s statistics, total minutes spent on social networking sites for U.S. alone increased tremendously by 83%. Total minutes spent on Facebook increased dramatically by 700 percent year-over-year from 1.7 billion minutes in April 2008 to 13.9 billion minutes in April 2009. No doubt that with this number, Facebook is still the no.1 social network based on total minutes for the month.
A notable figure is of course Twitter’s exponential growth in terms of total number of minutes spent on its site. Twitter is current ranked number 5 social networking site. Meanwhile, MySpace was able to retain its second spot despite the huge decrease in the number of minutes spent by users on its site.
But the MySpace folks should not loose hope, as the same analysis show that MySpace is the no.1 social network when ranked by video streams and the total number of minutes spent by users watching videos at MySpace.com. Average minutes per viewer for MySpace is at 38.8 minutes, while Facebook visitors spent only 11.2 minutes per video viewer.
If you’re wondering who the users we are talking about here, Nielsen has also made a graphical comparison of both MySpace and Facebook’s Unique Audience Composition Index by Age Group.
The Nielsen analysis show that the highest indexing age groups of MySpace and Facebook differ. Facebook’s highest audience belong to the 25-34 and 35-49 age groups while for MySpace, it was users belonging to ages 18 to 24 and 12 to 17.
It seems that Facebook has already captured the more matured audience than MySpace. No wonder it is the no.1 social networking site if we are to based the ranking on unique visitors and total number of users.