The Top 10 Most Popular Social Networks (2010)

In the past few years, Facebook has surpassed MySpace as the most popular social network and Twitter has become so popular that news anchors read tweets while on the air. And while the surge in popularity for social networking centered around social networks designed for schools, it is being increasingly used by adults, with only one out of every ten Twitter uses being under the age of 18.

For the last couple of years, Compete.com has published a list of the top twenty-five social networks. Since Compete didn’t publish the list this year, I thought it would be fun to see how the social networks are doing.

However, to change things up, I’m using unique visitors as the key demographic rather than total monthly visits. This gives a slightly different perspective, with social networks like LinkedIn that people may not visit on a daily basis looking a little better side-by-side with Facebook, which people might visit several times a day.

1. Facebook with 133,623,529 unique visits.
2. MySpace with 50,615,444 unique visits.
3. Twitter with 23,573,178 unique visits.
4. Linkedin with 15,475,890 unique visits.
5. Classmates with 14,613,381 unique visits.
6. MyLife with 8,736,352 unique visits.
7. Ning with 6,120,667 unique visits.
8. LiveJournal with 3,834,155 unique visits.
9. Tagged with 3,800,325 unique visits.
10. Last.fm with 3,473,978 unique visits.

Perhaps the two biggest surprises were Facebook’s nearly doubling their monthly visitors in the last year and Twitter quadrupling their monthly visitors. Twitter also tripled their monthly visits, which makes it easy to crown them as the fastest growing social network.

Also of interest is MySpace’s 13% decrease. It might not be surprising to note that MySpace is losing traffic to Facebook, but MySpace recently acquired Imeem, which was previously ranked 10th on the most popular social networks list. When you add the two together, MySpace shrunk by around 20% over the last year.

 

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