I was playing around with the fancy new chat feature in Facebook a couple nights ago, and started talking to my college buddy from a few years back. Soon I was chatting with my boyfriend’s mom, and eventually started talking to my 11 year-old cousin. I started to realize just how clear it’s become that Facebook is no longer just for college kids. In fact, social networking is beginning to spread to the population regardless of age. As detailed in the recent Compete webinar on Segment-Driven Marketing, 92% of marketing professionals say their company uses segmentation to manage their online advertising and /or search marketing. Judging by the amount of ads for hip, cool prepaid phones, trendy clothing and “hot shoes,” I’d say companies see Facebook and other social networking sites as the perfect place to target that “young adult” audience. With people of every demographic beginning to use these sites, is this really a smart way to spend their ad budgets?

I made use of Compete’s Behavior Match product to find out. I know from discussions with our clients that wireless carriers specifically are very interested in the young adult segment, so I thought I’d do some analysis on the young adults we’ve seen shopping carrier sites. I created a segment of “Young Adult Wireless Prospects”, defined as anyone from 18-34 who were seen visiting a wireless carrier site (but not seen as acting like a customer of that site), and looked at which sites they over-index on as compared to the internet population as a whole.

*Read as: Young Adult Wireless Prospects are 1.5x more likely to visit Facebook than the average internet user.

While Young Adult Wireless Prospects do over-index on Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube it is not by a staggering amount, as on average Young Adult Wireless Prospects only visit the big social networking sites 1.4 times as often as the general internet population. One can’t deny that getting your message and name out to the millions of people visiting these sites is an impressive thing (though expensive), but in terms of segment-based marketing strategies, I think the wireless companies may be missing the mark.

There is another category of sites Young Adult Wireless Prospects over-index on; Computer and Website Personalization sites appear high and often on the Behavior Match indexing report. Specifically, Young Adult Wireless Prospects over-index on sites designed to help you make your MySpace page or Facebook profile “cooler.”

Personalization sites for the social networking sites generally have a higher concentration of the Young Adult Wireless Prospect crowd than the social networking sites themselves (and are also all ad-supported). But would these consumers be susceptible to marketing messages? Are they engaged on these sites?

This chart is looking at the number of visits each domain sees on a monthly basis. Visits are a good way to measure if a site is seeing enough repeat visitors to make advertising on the site effective. We can see that Freeweblayouts.net and Freepagegraphics.com see a lot of repeat visitors, with around 4 million and 3 million visits a month, respectively. Imikimi.com isn’t far behind with about 1.5 million visits and the rest are tight around the 500,000 mark. It appears as though these sites are more than just a one-stop shop for their users.

So what does all this mean? Major websites will always be a good place to advertise, but when it comes to behaviorally segmenting Young Adult Wireless Prospects, there could be a more efficient way to go about it. Within the category of Computer and Website Personalization sites alone, there are a few sites that receive over a million users a month and on which Young Adult Wireless Prospects are 3.5X more likely to visit than the internet population in general. Messaging on these sites could be a perfect way to efficiently target a key segment in the wireless industry, while still getting the message out to millions of people.

We all know this person: constantly showing up in your Facebook news feed with status updates, added friends and wall comments. The “stickiness” of most social sites is unrivaled by any other type of site, a point that the behavior of hardcore members really drive home. These “Social Addicts” check their beloved site constantly and have helped encourage similar behavior from other users.

Knowing how different Facebook and MySpace are in terms of design, functionality and usage, how much do “addicts” of these social networks differ? You may have read some of our posts on BehaviorMatch before, but this analysis essentially highlights the online behavior that is specific to a particular group of users. This analysis is designed to help with media buying, but in the case of social networks it can also help define the psychographic makeup of the group, and how “addicts” generally use their favorite social site.

The table below shows the sites that MySpace and Facebook Addicts* visited substantially more than the average internet user. So what do these users do when they aren’t getting their social network fix?

• To be fair, the MySpace list is filtered. An untouched list of the top twenty most popular websites among MySpace addicts would consist entirely of sites focused on modifying personal profile pages.
• After scrubbing out a majority of the sites focused on MySpace layouts, it seems that the hardcore users of this MySpace are still primarily teens, as sites focused on proms (meprom.com), shoes (kicksaholic.com), and Alternative music (warpedtour.com) bubble to the top of the list.
• It’s no surprise that hardcore Facebook users have a high affinity to some sites supporting Facebook applications, but the applications they interact with the most is telling of their online interests. It appears gaming (socialgn.com), dating (sexappealhq.com), music (garageband.com), and interacting with friends (quizapps.com) are all a core online activity to Facebook addicts.

MySpace and Facebook are two well established sites with massive audiences. Twitter, on the other hand, is a much smaller, growing site devoted to communication. In some ways it could be seen as the direction the social web is heading…and it’s also highly addicting. So what do the sites that Twitter addicts visit say about the future of the web, and how does this compare to the two more traditional social web players?

Comparing the three, some really compelling trends are visible. While it’s not shocking that sites like twhirl.org (a site that offers “tweet” enabling software) rise to the top of the list, some of the others show that these users are most interested in socializing.

• MySpace addicts are somewhat vain – focusing heavily on establishing and fine tuning their online personas by customization of their personal profiles
• Facebook addicts focus more on engagement – interacting with applications, music and people both on and off the platform
• Twitter addicts are most interested in fostering communication and exploration – sites that allow a user to understand what their contacts are doing, provide a platform for content discovery and encourage users to actively participate are the most likely places to find hardcore twitterers.

* In this analysis Facebook and MySpace addicts were defined as any user who logged into either site at least 21 days in February. Twitter addicts were defined as anyone who went to their twitter home page at least 10 times in a month. The less stringent qualifications for Twitter addicts was necessary because of the multiple channels used to access the site (mobile, desktop applications).

Earlier this week, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg made Forbes list of the World’s Richest Men. Facebook certainly had more ups than downs in 2007, but can the site continue its rapid growth into 2008? Where’s MySpace and what else is going in the social web? It appears that the real movers in and shakers in 2008 weren’t moving much in early 2007.

For the big players in the space, February represented a slight decrease in traffic, but the year- over-year growth rates seem to indicate that social networking (as an industry) has yet to peak. The table below shows the top social networks in February 2008, ranked by monthly visits. This ranking factors in both total audience size, and also intensity of use.

UPDATED - 3/13

• Myspace was down slightly from February 2007 in terms of total US visits. However, the networking giant still holds a commanding traffic lead over all other Social sites.
• Facebook visits fell slightly from January 2008 to February 2008, but over the year the site has grown by over 75%. In terms of US visitors, it is now about one half the size of Myspace, but receives about 1/3rd as many visits.
• Niche markets are still attractive in terms of Social networking: Cafemom (a social network geared towards mothers), Linkedin (a networking site for professionals) and Fubar (“the first online bar”) all grew by 5X or more from February 2007 through February 2008. Fubar, in fact, exploded into the top 20 networks from relative obscurity one year ago.
• Innovative business models also had success in 2007: Communication platform Twitter, and white label social network Ning, both found a dramatically larger audience in the past year.

While fairly flat trend lines in MySpace traffic may provide an indication of the market reaching its peak, the rapid growth of some very new players in the space speaks to the opportunities in social networking that still exist… but only time will tell if Zuckerburg makes Forbe’s list next year.

Update: At the request of several of our readers, we’ve updated the table to include several prominent social networks that were left off the original post:

• imeem.com
• livejournal.com
• 360.yahoo.com

• 15.4 million Facebook users interacted with fb Application pages (@ apps.facebook.com) in January:

  

• On average ~51% of Facebook’s user base engages with Application pages:

  

• In January, fb Application pages directly contributed 1.5 billion pages (8.4% of total) to Facebook.com’s total page view count. Given the trend, I expect Application pages to gradually form a larger chunk of Facebook.com’s overall page views over time.

  Note: Stats in this post are limited to activity on apps.facebook.com. Most Facebook Applications load pages in iframes from 3rd party (non-facebook) servers. According to sources, users can generate well over >10 page views on 3rd party servers for each one that they see on apps.facebook.com. In January, Compete estimates ~1.5 billion page loads of apps.facebook.com, which translates to roughly 11-12 billion page views across Facebook app iframes.

  

• 6-month gains in time spent, sessions, and page views generated on apps.facebook.com:

  

Bottom-line:
This data reinforces the fact that Facebook’s Application strategy and ongoing refinements appear to be working. Now the big question — as Facebook’s unique visitor growth plateaus, what will be their next traffic growth engine? They are still 36 million short of MySpace.com’s 67 million U.S. unique visitors.

Does privacy matter to most Facebook users? Take a look at the chart below, and judge for yourself (weekly unique visitors to facebook’s privacy settings pages):

Even after all the recent mainstream media coverage and debate surrounding Facebook’s controversial beacon program, online privacy in general, and Facebook making available universal beacon opt-out — traffic to Facebook’s privacy settings pages has essentially been flat. NOT A GOOD SIGN!

It’s likely that the average Facebook user DOES care about their privacy, and know they should do something about it, but are mostly unaware or don’t know what they can or should do. Should Facebook be doing more around online privacy education? There is a lot of unintended sharing going on, and I think it is in Facebook’s long term best interest to do so.

Apple has a long history of releasing critically acclaimed ads starting back in 1984 with “The Greatest Commercial of All Time.” More recently, one of the coolest aspects of Apple advertising has been the use of relatively unknown musicians, with their music as the (seemingly) most important element of the commercial. Through multi-million dollar ad campaigns, Apple helps bring these lesser-known artists mainstream. With the recent launch of the iPod Nano, iPod Touch and Macbook Air, Compete took a look at how consumers exposure to offline commercials influenced online behavior, and also how artists (and Apple) benefit from a partnership.

What’s incredible is how high quality TV commercials can foster online research. From August 2007 to January 2008, US consumers conducted nearly 1 million queries for iPod related commercials or the underlying music. The table below shows the top 20 search phrases (in terms of query volume), and how these queries were conducted over the period.

Its interesting to note that 15 of the top 20 searches contained the word “song” or “music” and also helps to explain search behavior. With almost no information being given about the music used in Apple commercials, consumers unfamiliar with the artist (and apparently enjoyed the song) naturally search for the song in the commercial.

Additionally, the fact that September was such a huge month in terms of Apple commercial search activity indicates the degree to which consumers enjoyed Feist’s “1-2-3-4,” a song that appeared in Apple iPod Nano commercials. Over 425,000 people were actively searching for the song in this commercial in September.

Apple TV ads are all about branding, but they apparently do a great job at getting people to revisit the advertisements online. They also are an amazing opportunity for an undiscovered musician. For all three artists in recent commercials (Feist, CSS, and Yael Naim), Apple ads resulted in exponentially greater exposure to consumers, even excluding the offline component.

• For Fiest’s “1-2-3-4” YouTube video, traffic grew 1200% from the month prior to the Nano commercial’s launch, and over 45X when views of the actual commercial (on YouTube, or Apple) was included.
• Growth for CSS’s “Music is my hot hot sex,” which was created by an fan, and then used by Apple, showed substantial growth as well.
• It appears that being exposed through Apple commercials also results in loyalty. In fact, 3 months after the Nano commercial launched, traffic to Feist “1-2-3-4” videos on YouTube was receiving 5 times the monthly views it was getting prior to its feature in the Nano commercial.
• It’s not surprising, but people seem to have confused the iPhone with the iPod Touch. Traffic to iPhone commercial videos on YouTube and Apple.com spiked around the same time as the iPod Touch ad was released. (not shown)

What is so significant about Apple’s advertising is that it not only helps to define the company and generate demand for talented musicians, but also helps encourage the music discovery process, which ties directly back to iTunes. By exposing consumers to great music from new (or unknown) artists, they get people interested in the music search. With an artist the company exposed nominated for a Grammy, and millions of people seeking out commercials instead of avoiding them, Apple is doing a few things right.