Twitter, Facebook soar as Myspace sags in US market share

Facebook and Twitter have shown strong growth over the past year.

New numbers released by Nielsen Market Research today suggest that Facebook has increased its US traffic by nearly 70% year over year, notching more than 115 million unique visitors. In the same time period, Twitter has increased their US traffic by 45%, reaching more than 20 million unique visitors.

Over the same time period, Myspace has seen its US traffic sag nearly 25%, leaving it with 45 million page views in the last year. This number is rapidly dropping, too.

In short, Facebook and Twitter have cemented their position as the market leaders.

While Myspace still has more unique viewers and users than Twitter, Twitter’s still seen a very high adoption rate. As the unique audience of social networking sites has grown ( from 261 million total unique hits to 314 million unique hits in the last year), Twitter and Facebook continue to take the lion’s share of the traffic.

Another promising stat for Facebook and Twitter is the total time spent on social networking sites. In the past year, the total time spent on these sites has more than doubled, from a total of 55 billion minutes last year to an astonishing 113 billion this year. In fact, time spent on social networking sites per person has nearly tripled in the past two years.

This presents an opportunity for a huge windfall for Facebook and Twitter. The more time users spend on the site, the more likely they are to click on ads. If ad traffic increases, Facebook and Twitter can sell their ads for more, increasing revenues. In short, Facebook and Twitter stand to make a lot of money in the coming year.

Thanks to Nielsen and BioJobBlog for the images.