How much of this is driven by the 9.2% unemployment rate is unknown, but Nielsen released a report this week called “Global Faces and Networked Places” which has some amazing statistics on how much time people are spending on social networking sites.

The winners are the new folks, sites like Twitter with a 3712 percent increase in the time that people spent using the site, to Facebook’s year over year growth at 699%. Losers in the crowd, MySpace and Gaia online with a 31% and 17% drop in minutes spent on the site respectively. While this is bad that MySpace lost almost a third of its audience minutes, people are seriously putting in time on Blogger, Tagged, Live Journal and other social sites.

What is the most telling is the age demographic, social networking is not just for kids with Facebook’s age band growth being the highest for people over the age of 35. While it might be dull to be haunted by folks you went to high school with 25 years ago, it is kind of fun to see how those folks who were so important then have ended up. Facebook has become the “reunion system” on steroids, blowing sites like Classmates.com out of the water.

What is also interesting is the global reach. With the concepts of Globalization 3.0 firmly established, in that a person now has the same ability to do something that a nation state has, or a corporation has, the global reach of systems like LinkedIn and Facebook for helping to drive change, innovation, and general networking is also becoming more important. When you look at the change in reach for LinkedIn at +137% for the year, people globally are starting to connect more. The more connections, the easier it is going to be to start an international company, or help drive international innovation in products, design, research and other ways that people can make money.

The Nielsen report is something you are going to want to read if you are following social media metrics and statistics overall. This is just a wealth of information, and if you are advertising on social media, or wondering what the influence of social media has been globally, all you have to do is look at the demographics and the number of minutes spent on social networking sites to see exactly how social networking is embedding itself into the popular culture on a global level.

Tags: Nielson, report, social networking, minutes, people, globalization, time

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