The Social

Update Tuesday 4:14 a.m. PDT: Facebook and Nielsen have officially announced their multiyear deal.

As part of the Advertising Week festivities in New York, Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg is slated to make a marketing-related announcement on Tuesday morning.

The announcement of a partnership with Nielsen on a product called "BrandLift," which polls Facebook users on ads they see on the social network, was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

There weren't a whole lot of details disclosed, even when the two companies confirmed the news of "a multi-year, strategic alliance" later on Monday. Nielsen BrandLift, a release explained, is the first product created from the deal. It will use opt-in polls on Facebook's home page to gauge user sentiment around advertisements, measuring "aided awareness, ad recall, message association, brand favorability, and purchase consideration." It'll roll out in the U.S. to a number of test partners this week and to all advertisers over the next few months. There will be "hundreds" of BrandLift tests in that time, the release explained.

An end date to the multi-year deal has not been disclosed, Nielsen Online CEO John Burbank told CNET News on Monday evening.

For now, Nielsen BrandLift is part of its partnership with Facebook. But the product "will expand to other websites" eventually, Burbank said. He wouldn't comment on repeated rumors that Facebook would be launching an ad network for sites participating in its Facebook Connect program.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based Facebook has a history of big New York marketing pushes to further establish itself as a major player on Madison Avenue. Earlier this year, Sandberg keynoted the AdAge Digital conference to pitch Facebook's "active network" of friend connections as a powerful advertising tool, and two years ago Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the social network's first major advertising initiative shortly after Microsoft had taken a $240 million stake in the company.

(Part of that 2007 announcement included Beacon, the ill-fated advertising program that Facebook finally put the kibosh on this week.)

Getting statistics on advertising effectiveness is important for Facebook, especially with a longtime industry player like Nielsen on board. While Facebook has been growing in prominence as a digital ad destination, it's still had to do some convincing to combat the industry attitude that social-media advertising doesn't work.

Also sure to be mentioned at Tuesday's announcement? The fact that Facebook has recently hit 300 million active users around the world and continues to grow fast. That's a lot of eyeballs.

Nielsen's own measurements of Facebook traffic place the social network as the fourth largest unique audience in the U.S. (and remember, most of its traffic is now overseas), and that out of all Web-based brands it enjoys the most individual time spent per user.

This post was expanded at 7:33 p.m. PT.

Nielsen's five fastest-growing community sites in the U.S.

(Credit: Nielsen)

A small new survey from Nielsen about the five fastest growing "member community destinations" in the U.S. reveals what we all kind of knew already: Twitter is at the top. From February 2008 to February 2009, it clocked in at a whopping 1,382 percent growth rate. That's to be expected, considering the amount of press the still-without-a-business-model microblogging service has gotten in recent months.

In third place is Facebook, with 228 percent growth year-over-year according to Nielsen. That's not terribly surprising, as Facebook is still growing in the U.S. but not quite as exponentially as it once was.

There are, beyond that, a handful of interesting things to note. Two of Nielsen's top five, for example, aren't social networks but rather wiki creation services: Zimbio (240 percent growth) and Wikia (172 percent growth). And in fourth place is Multiply, which probably got a surge of activity when it recently acquired the MSN Groups service that Microsoft was spinning off.

But a blog post from Nielsen said that Twitter (which counts the 35-to-49 age demographic as its biggest, the statistics said) may be growing even faster than its numbers say. "PC Web usage of Twitter.com doesn't tell the whole story," the post by Nielsen Online's Michelle McGiboney read. "The ability to (use) Twitter via a mobile phone--whether through the mobile Web or via text messages--is a driving factor in the social network's success. In January, 735,000 unique visitors accessed the Twitter Web site through their mobile phones. The average unique visitor went to Twitter.com 14 times during the month and spent an average of seven minutes on the site."

An additional 812,000 users accessed Twitter via text message on the AT&T and Verizon carriers alone.

Nielsen has released numbers for its estimates on the biggest and fastest-growing social media sites in the U.S. for the month of September, and there are a few surprises.

The biggest social network in the U.S. is still News Corp.'s MySpace, Nielsen's numbers found. But the bad news is that its traffic has only grown by 1 percent since September 2007, keeping it just under 60 million visitors, and second-place rival Facebook has grown by 116 percent in the same time period.

Rounding out the top 10 social networks are (in order) Classmates Online, a mainstay that gets little press but a lot of traffic; business networking site LinkedIn; Microsoft's Windows Live Spaces, which Nielsen says has shrunk by eleven percent since September 2007; Reunion.com; kiddie site Club Penguin, now owned by Disney; AOL Hometown, which the service plans to shutter soon; Tagged; and the AOL Community site.

Nielsen's ranking of the fastest-growing social sites is a little more interesting. At the top of the list is Twitter, fueled by loads of press and tie-ins to coverage of the hotly contested presidential election, with 343 percent growth since September 2007. Following in second place is Tagged, which clocked in 330 percent traffic growth and which Nielsen says is most popular with the 35-49 age demographic. In third place is Ning, which is actually a service for creating community sites, followed by LinkedIn, music site Last.fm (owned by CBS Interactive, which publishes CNET News, Facebook, teen site MyYearbook, and then AOL's Bebo.

In ninth place is Multiply, a social network for the nongeek set that recently announced that it had partnered with Microsoft to absorb the MSN Groups service. And in tenth place is Reunion.com, which Nielsen says counts the 55-64 age demographic as its biggest.

(Credit: Nielsen)

The April 2008 iteration of those numbers that Nielsen releases each month about social-networking site activity indicate that growth on News Corp.'s MySpace continues to slow, and that kiddie virtual world Club Penguin--acquired by Disney last year for $350 million--is just about static.

The Nielsen numbers, which track monthly unique visitors to social-networking sites, found that MySpace's growth from April 2007 to April 2008 was just 3 percent, and that Club Penguin's traffic shrank 7 percent. If Nielsen's numbers are accurate (which is always debatable with online metrics), that's not good for News Corp and Disney. In August, for example, the same methodology from Nielsen found that Club Penguin had grown 250 percent year-over-year and that MySpace was still growing at a healthy rate of 23 percent.

The numbers also reveal that business social network LinkedIn, which may or may not be aiming for a billion-dollar valuation, is still growing rapidly, pulling in 361 percent more unique users than it did a year ago. Facebook is growing more slowly, with 56 percent more visitors--and keep in mind that April 2007 was just a month before the company announced its developer platform and "exploded," at least in terms of Valley chit-chat.

Music-focused social-media sites Imeem and Buzznet are also notable, pulling in 92 percent and 104 percent growth respectively. Over the past year, both well-funded sites have been pursuing ambitious development strategies: Imeem has been inking licensing deals with both music and video content providers, and Buzznet has been acquiring blogs like Stereogum and the formerly Gawker Media-owned Idolator.

Are our friends across the pond getting tired of social-networking sites?

New figures from Nielsen Online, cited by the Guardian in an article Thursday, suggest that they just might be.

Facebook, according to the numbers, experienced a 5 percent drop in U.K. traffic between December and January--as did MySpace.com. Bebo, a smaller presence in the U.S. but wildly popular in the U.K., saw its unique users drop 2 percent in the same period.

If anything, this could mean that after rapid expansion, social networks have reached a saturation point. "It was inevitable that early growth rates couldn't be sustained, and the larger networks have been plateauing over the last few months," Nielsen analyst Alex Burmaster told the Guardian.

Despite the dip, Facebook has grown phenomenally in the U.K. (and just about everywhere else) over the past year. Nielsen statistics say that even with the December-January drop, the site has grown 712 percent in the U.K. since the same period a year earlier.

Last year, Facebook overtook both MySpace and Bebo as the most popular social-networking site in the U.K. In the U.S., MySpace remains at the top, with Facebook in second place and Bebo lagging behind.

Each month, I get a fun little e-mail from Nielsen/NetRatings, the online division of the big-name metrics firm, with some tracking numbers for unique visitors at social media sites--namely, social networks, blogs, and video-sharing sites. They're pretty anecdotal as far as traffic metrics go, but it's still fun to see who's losing and who's gaining--you know, like sports. And each month, I eagerly open the e-mail (no, really) to see if there are any juicy surprises in store. This month's version, which includes numbers for August (percentage growth from August 2006 to August 2007, is sadly low on the juiciness factor. The numbers largely aren't that different from July's.

First, here's the social network lineup. In short: Facebook's growing fast, but LinkedIn is growing faster. MySpace is growing, but not as fast. AOL's social networks are suffering. Music site Buzznet is riding the early adopter wave, and the Disney-acquired kids' social network Club Penguin hasn't run out of momentum yet. Classmates' growth has slowed a bit, perhaps as the gossip about its potential IPO wanes. All in all, these numbers are almost identical to July's, with no new entrants on the list whatsoever.

Next month may prove to be more interesting for Facebook, to see if there is a spike in September growth as new university students enroll for the site (which started, as you probably recall, as an online replacement for college heralds). Will it grow at an even faster pace than we're already seeing, or are enough high schoolers using Facebook so that they already have accounts when they arrive on campus? In either case, we'll probably see more use of the site now that the school year has started anyway. As any member of the "Facebook generation" could tell you, it's a great time-suck, especially when there's a paper due the next day.

The "top blogs" list continues to bizarrely index blogging platforms like Xanga and Blogger alongside media titles like TMZ.com and Perez Hilton. It would be much easier if these were differentiated into separate categories, but I suppose we'll have to settle for the combined list for now. Like the social-networking numbers, the blog numbers haven't changed much: Google's Blogger is still on top, WordPress is still growing really fast, Xanga continues to shrink, and celebrity gossip still dominates the blogosphere. Geek staples Gizmodo and Engadget have dropped off the list, maybe because August was a quieter month for iPhone news than July had been; we'll see if they jump back up in this month's numbers when those come out.

On the video-sharing rankings, Atom Films has replaced Funny or Die in the bottom notch, and Veoh and Yahoo Video continue to grow much faster than YouTube, whose growth has slowed a bit (81 percent in July's numbers down to 66 percent in August's). It looks as if MySpace's video market share is shrinking, but interestingly enough, it is still using the vids.myspace.com domain for tracking rather than MySpaceTV.com, which launched this summer. Google Video's growth is slowing (down from a 69 percent growth rate in July), perhaps because its parent company has pulled it out of the spotlight in favor of its YouTube purchase.

We'll have to see when the September numbers come out next month if social media patterns have changed along with the season.

Clearly, social-networking metrics are the new black. It seems like just about everyone wants to know whether Facebook will pass MySpace--or whether there are any trendy, fast-moving start-ups that you ought to be monitoring so that you can start up a profile and amass a healthy friends list before it gets too trendy.

Last month, ComScore released numbers pertaining to social networking's worldwide growth. Now, Nielsen/NetRatings' PR team has released its latest set of figures that track how quickly the top social-networking sites are growing. The results are divided into three different categories of social media: social networks, blogs (and blog platforms) and video sites.

It looks like Nielsen has tweaked its criteria over the past month, because the lists are strikingly different from analogous ones it released for June: in those, sites like YouTube and Blogger were included among social-networking sites as well as in the "top blogs" and "top video sites" categories. It made for a rather confusing list, seeing as you had TypePad alongside Facebook under the "social networking" umbrella. Now, it looks like the main social-networking site list consists exclusively of community sites.

A couple of the names on the July list are riding the word-of-mouth wave: kiddie network Club Penguin, for example, was just purchased by Disney; Classmates.com is rumored to be heading for an IPO; and newcomer Buzznet, a music-based site, is just making its debut. Facebook, of course, is on the rise, but interestingly enough the results indicate that LinkedIn has grown twice as fast over the past year.

The aforementioned second category, "top blogs," is still a little bit confusing because it does indeed include destination blogs (like TMZ.com, Perez Hilton, and Engadget) and the major blog host platforms like Six Apart's TypePad and Google's Blogger. So there's a little bit of disconnect, but it does give you the gist of things: Xanga's shrinking, WordPress is growing fast, and way too many people read Perez Hilton and TMZ at the office. But we knew all that already.

Then there's the third list, of top video sites. In the top spot is (who else?) YouTube, followed by the MySpace video platform in its older form. I'm guessing that the new MySpaceTV portal hasn't been around for nearly long enough to be included in the figures. Also in the rankings are the corresponding video portals for major tech hubs' home pages (AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft) as well as big-media-backed start-ups like video-sharing site Veoh and comedy site Funny Or Die.

Update 12:20 p.m. PDT: The headline on table No. 3 says "June 2007" but those figures are in fact for July.

Don't you just love statistics?