The latest Nielsen (@NielsenWire) report (pdf) shows that social media’s popularity continues to grow, connecting people with just about everything they watch and buy.
· 60% percent of people who use three or more digital means of research for product purchases learn about a specific brand or retailer from a social networking site.
· Social networks and blogs took 22.5% of Internet usage time in May 2011, beating online games' 9.8%, email's 7.6%, portals' 4.5%, video and films' 4.4% and search's 4%.
· US Web users spent 53.5 billion minutes on Facebook during the month, beating out Yahoo's 17.2 billion minutes, Google's 12.5 billion minutes, YouTube's 9.5 billion minutes, eBay's 4.5 billion minutes, and Apple's 4.3 billion minutes.
· Facebook received 140 million unique visitors in May, with 62% of page views on the site attributable to females; 50 million individuals accessed Blogger; 23.6 million went to Twitter.
· Blogging provider Wordpress attracted 22.4 million people, trailed by MySpace with 19.3 million, LinkedIn with 17.8 million, and Tumblr, another blog hosting platform, with 11.9 million.
· 53% of "active" social networkers currently follow a brand.
· Year over year growth of people accessing social networks via mobile rose 62%: 46.5 million people visiting Facebook, 11.5 million for Twitter, 6 million LinkedIn, and 4 million MySpace.
· In all, 97% of members access social networks on a computer, 37% employ mobile phones, 3% deploy a games console or iPad, and 2% leverage Web-enabled TV sets and ereaders.
· About 30% of consumers value being able to use social networks on their phone.
· A further 21% liked scanning barcodes with a handset, 20% cited making payments, 16% prioritized "check-in" services such as Foursquare and 13% enjoyed giving feedback to companies.
· 67% of smartphone owners had downloaded gaming apps, 65% selected equivalent weather-related tools, 60% utilized applications from social networks, and 55% used navigation and search facilities.
· 17.8 million women watch video on social networks, versus 13.6 million men.
Read the report in full (pdf).
Also see our previous blogpost, “Report: Half of Americans Are Now Social Networkers.”