Social Networking, the fabric of global internet

Social Networking
In a recent press release comscore released Social networking global visitor reports. Here's a brief of the report followed with how one can effectively measure/track success of Social networking sites.

Social networking behemoth MySpace.com attracted more than 114 million global visitors age 15 and older in June 2007, representing a 72-percent increase versus year ago. Facebook.com experienced even stronger growth during that same time frame, jumping 270 percent to 52.2 million visitors. Bebo.com (up 172 percent to 18.2 million visitors) and Tagged.com (up 774 percent to 13.2 million visitors) also increased by orders of magnitude.


“During the past year, social networking has really taken off globally,” said Bob Ivins, executive vice president of international markets. “Literally hundreds of millions of people around the world are visiting social networking sites each month and many are doing so on a daily basis. It would appear that social networking is not a fad but rather an activity that is being woven into the very fabric of the global Internet.”

It would appear that social networking is not a fad but rather an activity that is being woven into the very fabric of the global Internet.

A fundamental aspect of the success of social networking sites is cultural relevance,” continued Mr. Ivins. “Those doing well in certain regions are likely doing an effective job of communicating appropriately with those regions’ specific populations. As social networking continues to evolve, it will be exciting to see if networks are able to cross cultural barriers and bring people from different corners of the globe together in fulfilling the truest ideals of social networking.

i personally love Facebook! but iam also on orkut! well yeah everybody is on orkut in india.
Which ones are you on? :)

Ok here comes the best part! how do you measure/track Social networking sites? what are the KPI's for these kind of sites.

Top Social networking sites: Myspace, Facebook, hi5, friendster, orkut, beebo and Tagged

These are transcripts (with my comments) from Dennis R. Mortensen blog post about measuring Social networking sites. The entire post is here. I strongly recommend you read the entire post in which also has 7 Optimization opportunities for any social networking sites.

okie getting back, it's a fact that Social Networking is the prime headline for Web 2.0 and highly successful so far. This fact only leading towards an even greater responsibility in trying to measure ROI on ones social networking activities, especially as it is somehow agreed upon that only a limited number of players can win.

Why do Social Network site exists? Rather what's their objective ??

1.) Increase Advertising and/or premium member-ship Revenue ($$$$)
As the post from comscore clearly indicates social networking is now a global
phenomenon, this indeed will increase demographic/behavioral targeted advertising!
2.) Increase User engagement
Engagement is the word!, In a sentence global networking site bring people with common interest together increasing engagement, and as Eric Peterson describes User Engagement is an estimate of the degree and depth of visitor interaction on the website against a clearly defined set of measurable goals

Right now we know the objectives! let's get to the KPI's to track the success of these business objectives.

1.) Advertising Revenue KPI

Advertising Revenue
Visits per week
Ad units per visit*
Ads served*
Ad CTR

* The “Ad units per visit” KPI is a replacement for the old "page views per visit" as a way of indicating the size of your Ad inventory and the “Ads served” KPI is the actual number of revenue generating banners or other media type served in those units.
“Social Network User Engagement is an estimate of the degree and depth of visitor interaction on the website against a clearly defined set of measurable goals.” – and with that in mind we can define our KPI’s.

2.) User Engagement KPI
Social Network User Engagement is an estimate of the degree and depth of visitor interaction on the website against a clearly defined set of measurable goals.” – and with that in mind we can define our KPI’s.

Social Networking user engagement KPI’s:

User Engagement*
Anonymous visitors to members conversion rate*
Active member length
Time since last login
Total time spent on site

* The “User Engagement” KPI is a custom session metric designed and calculated from a set of basic metrics such as for example; pages viewed, time spent on site, time since last login, comments or other content submitted, subscribed to a feed or alert and so on – the calculation of this KPI is highly dependent on the structure of the Social Network in question). The “Anonymous visitors to members conversion rate” is very much a growth KPI that is used until the Social Network reaches its final plateau.

Although this might not be the exhaustive list, but certainly some great KPI's to start of with!
Feel free to add if i missed anything via comments!

Source:Comscore

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