Have you started noticing the following symptomatic behaviours?
1. The laptop is now spending more time in your bedroom rather than the office
2. Your checking your Facebook updates before you go to the bathroom in the morning
3. You communicate via a Facebook private message rather than use email
If that is the case you are not alone. Recently I was having a conversation with a friend of mine and he had been trying to contact a relative in another country and despite trying numerous types of technology such as email, SMS and telephone was not immediately successful. Finally he was able to get in touch and when they had a conversation her initial response was “why didn’t you contact me on Facebook?”
It appears that social media network use (and possible addiction) has increased significantly in the past 12 months. The latest figures from Nielsen are showing that social media network use is up by 43 percent from 15.8 percent of online time in 2009 to 22.7 percent in 2010.
The new research study by Nielsen also reveals that Americans spend 40% of their time online with just three activities
- Social Networking (22.7% of time online)
- Online Games (10.2% )
- Email (8.3%)
This graphic image really highlights the domination of online time by social networks. What should also be kept in mind is that a lot of online gaming is actually social gaming (people competing in online games as a social network activity) and should be included in some part of the activity time online in social networks.
Some of the other findings were.
- Online games overtook personal email to become the second most heavily used activity behind social networks – accounting for 10 percent of all U.S. Internet time.
- Email dropped from 11.5 percent of time to 8.3 percent.
- Videos was the only other to experience a significant growth in share of U.S. activity online grew by 12 percent from 3.5 to 3.9 percent.
- June 2010 was a major milestone for U.S. online video as the number of videos streamed passed the 10 billion mark.
- The average American consumer streaming online video spent 3 hours 15 minutes doing so during the month.
- Email is the dominant use of mobile internet users at 41.6 percent of time spent
- Portals are the second heaviest activity on mobile internet with 11.6 percent
- Social network use on mobile is placed third at 10.5 percent (up significantly from last year)