Online Social Networking - UK - April 2008

Abstract

If anything justifies the use of the word ' phenomenon' it is the growth of online social networking seen in the UK over the past year to 18 months. Metrics data report triple-digit annual growth in traffic and ' Facebook' made it into the 2008 Collins English Dictionary as both a noun and a verb. As it says on the PG Tips monkey' s T-shirt: "I Facebooked your mum."

Following this period of explosive - and truly ' viral' - growth, the online social networking sector finds itself at a fascinating point in its development. The expansion graph has now levelled off to leave the main players competing for market share rather than new users, corporate activity increasing and the first signs of market fragmentation beginning to appear. In short: the market appears to be already mature.

What happens next is less clear, but potentially just as exciting as the growth period that has just passed. Mobile represents the great frontier, but remains tantalisingly out of reach; newly open development platforms look certain to enhance the sector' s reputation for application innovation, and investment in back-end technology will push back the boundaries of what is possible: a personalised social operating system pulling together the user' s presence on all their preferred online media - the ultimate open platform.

This report takes a snapshot of the current shape of this fast-moving sector and assesses the direction it may take in future by testing the hypothesis that "the emergence of online social networking is transforming the way we communicate and how we spend our leisure time, on- and offline".

Key themes of the report:

• How has the rise of social networking affected traditional leisure activities?
• Is social networking affecting the time spent on other Internet activities, like email?
• What are the differences between users and non-users of social networks?
• What are the differences between users of leading social networking sites?
• Is social networking necessarily limited to the young, technology-savvy consumer?
• What is the commercial appeal of social networking for advertisers?
• Which factors have been most important in driving up levels of social networking?
• Where are the main competitive pressures for social media coming from?