By Alan J.  Liddle

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(March  13, 2009) Internet social networks – increasingly on the radar of restaurant marketing pros – are seeing skyrocketing traffic worldwide, but nevertheless pose real challenges to advertisers and promotion peddlers, a new report indicates.

Visiting social networking sites and blogs became the fourth most common activity of Internet users in a block of several countries in 2008, surpassing even the reach of personal e-mail, Nielsen Online said March 11. And, it added, user demographics are changing as well.

The research findings also touched on the challenges faced by companies trying to advertise in those digital arenas, but pointed to the “Addicted to Starbucks” group at Facebook.com as an example of the brand-affinity-building potential of social networking sites. In recent weeks, that group had nearly 124,000 members who had taken part in, or perused, more than 670 discussion topics and been motivated to contribute almost 10,000 posts.

Audiences for online social networking sites now rank in the hundreds of millions worldwide, the report indicated, as Facebook alone added 71 million users in 2008 in just the countries monitored by Nielsen researchers.

Nielsen Online lumps together as “member communities” social networking sites, such as leaders Classmates.com, Facebook.com, Linkedin.com, Myspace.com and Orkut.com, as well as online blogs. Its report, “Global Faces and Networked Places – A Nielsen report on Social Networking’s New Global Footprint,” summarized findings of research involving the United States, Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

Among the findings: The audience composition of social networking websites “is shifting from the young to the old.” For example, in the year ended last December, Facebook.com saw the number of users ages 35 and up increase by 40.9 million in the monitored countries, versus an increase of 30.1 million for the group 34 and younger, according to research in the report.

Also highlighted: A significant percentage of people accessing the Internet on Web-enabled cellular phones and wireless PDAs are hitting social networking sites. The percentage in the fourth quarter of 2008 was greatest in the United Kingdom, Nielsen said, with 22.7 percent of mobile Web surfers hitting such sites. Next came the United States, where the number was 19.2 percent. The trend was least pronounced among monitored countries in Germany, where 6.6 percent of mobile browsers peeked in at social networks.

Overall, in the year ended in December 2008, the reach of member communities grew by about 5.4 percent, to 66.8 percent of Internet users in all monitored countries, while personal e-mail use increased by half of that, or 2.7 percent, to 65.1 percent, Nielsen said.

By Alan J.  Liddle

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In the U.S., member community reach grew by 2.6 percent, to 67 percent. The greatest year-over-year growth in reach among monitored countries, 10.3 percent, was measured in the U.K., where 69 percent of all Internet users were spending time at member community sites at the end of 2008. The smallest growth rate, 1.4 percent, was spotted in Brazil, where the reach of such sites is greatest among the countries surveyed at 80 percent.

Nielsen said search engine activities led both member community and personal e-mail activities in total user reach, with 85.9 percent reach. General interest portals and communities also were ahead, with 85.2 percent reach, as were the sites of software manufacturers, with an aggregate reach of 73.4 percent of the studied online user base. Nonetheless, each of these activities and sites experienced much slower rates of year-over-year growth than member communities.

Nielsen also found that the time Internet users spend at member community websites is growing faster than the general rate of growth in time spent online.

For the year ended in December, the aggregate amount of time spent online in the monitored countries increased by 18 percent, while the time spent at member communities grew by 63 percent, year-over-year. Though added to a relatively small base number, those additional minutes of use in 2008 nevertheless contributed to the member community sector’s 38-percent gain in the share of total time spent online, to 9.3 percent of all minutes logged for the researched activities.

The United States was an underachiever of sorts in this regard, the study indicated, as the total time U.S. Internet users spent at member community sites increased by 11 percent, to 6.4 percent of all time spent online by Internet users in this country.

Businesses wanting to target member communities with advertising face multiple challenges, Nielsen Online said. Chief among the challenges is that content found at member community websites typically is primarily provided by ‘community’ members, not publishing companies, the government or other single expert entities that own content. This can make these independent content contributors resistant to advertising that benefits a third party or may not be aligned with their own tastes or beliefs.

Also an issue, the research firm indicated, is that the highly targeted advertising made possible by the wealth of user personal information often associated with social networking sites is increasingly seen by member community users as an invasion of privacy. A survey of Australian Internet users showed that as of December 2008, 38 percent of the respondents felt advertising at social networking sites to be intrusive, compared to 29 percent who felt that way a year earlier.

Indeed, such partnerships, or at least wide-open lines of communications between advertisers and site operators, may be needed to avoid problems, such as Burger King’s sacrifice of its “Whopper Sacrifice” application at Facebook.com. That software offered a free sandwich to anyone who dumped 10 Facebook “friends,” and it tallied more than 60,000 active users before the chain pulled the plug because of site management’s concern about user privacy.

Among Nielsen Online’s recommendations is that any advertising targeting social network sites be “conversation” based, not “pushed” on users; that the tone be “more authentic, candid and humble” to generate positive word-of-mouth; and that any such advertising add value by way of interaction and consultation. Similar to a friendship, the research consultancy indicated, marketing on social networking sites requires a “continual investment – in terms of time and effort, as opposed to financial – to be of value to both parties.”

Contact Alan J. Liddle at aliddle@nrn.com.