According to traffic statistics released by UKOM/Nielsen, the major social networking sites, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, all had record months in May. It is thought that news of the Ryan Giggs injunction was at least partly responsible for the rise.
Facebook too saw significant growth, finally overtaking MSN to become the second most popular site in the UK behind Google in terms of user numbers. It recorded 26.8m unique users. LinkedIn had 3.6m UK users in May, a 57 per cent increase on the same period in 2010.
Twitter’s audience in the UK rose by around a third from April to May and interestingly, the number of female pensioners using the site doubled during this period.
Nielsen believes that it is over-50s who are currently driving social networking growth. Twitter saw a 65 per cent rise in male users aged between 50 and 64 as the gagging order story played out compared to the previous month.
UKOM general manager, James Smythe, said:
“Just a few years ago, this group may have found itself out of place on these sites. Now, on Facebook, for example, they account for more new adults visiting the site in the last two years than the under-50s.”
