Every time I’ve been trying to decide on a new place to go with friends recently, someone has inevitably said, “Check it out on Yelp,” but rarely has anyone suggested that we use Citysearch too. This sentiment seems to be reflected in the web traffic, with the perennial leader in local restaurant/entertainment reviews no longer alone at the top.

Through the end of last year Citysearch held a significant lead, but Yelp has closed the Unique Visitors gap in early ‘09 and already has Citysearch beaten out in several key engagement metrics.

Visitors to Yelp stay longer, view more content and come back more often - sounds like a recipe for success. We’ll keep an eye on this an see if Yelp can ride their dominant engagement to the UV lead in the coming months.

Check out the March monthly data on Site Analytics, Referral Analytics and Ranked Lists.

Highlights this month include Twitter continuing to surge, passing 14 million unique visitors.

And as a reminder, Search Analytics data is updated daily!

Social networks have been quite successful in capturing the attention of consumers online. As the level of interaction consumers have with this group of sites continues to grow, the opportunity for travel marketers to leverage these sites to drive brand awareness grows as well. Moreover, social networks are becoming increasingly well-positioned to drive traffic to brands in the online travel industry. From February 2008 to February 2009, the number of total monthly visits to social networking sites jumped 60%; just over 2.5 billion visits were made to social networking sites in February 2009.

As the volume of visits to social networks grows, it is not surprising that many online travel sites are experiencing increased traffic coming from this segment. We find first that the share of referrals from social networks to hotel websites is growing rapidly (up 151% since February 2008). Indeed, a similar trend (with respect to social networks’ share of referrals) exists for many other segments within and outside of the online travel industry. The more interesting finding is that the conversion rate of the referrals from social networks to hotel websites exhibits a similar growth trend, growing 98% year over year. Taken together, these findings indicate that social networks are increasingly a source of in-market traffic for hoteliers.

To be sure, as the role of social networks as a traffic source for the online travel industry continues to rise, the opportunity for savvy marketers to tap into the potential of these sites to generate incremental business value also grows. Competitive digital intelligence is a great tool for travel marketers in this respect and can be used to analyze which social networks resonate with a particular brand and to assess the conversion performance of social network referrals at competing brands to discover unexploited opportunities. It can also be used to investigate brand shopper engagement with various social networking features to ascertain which features and functionalities would align with a brand’s own social media implementations.

We welcome back Jay Meattle, a Compete.com original member, from HEPGURU for this guest post.

Below is a Digg and Facebook’s monthly Unique Visitor chart going all the way back to the month they were launched. After looking at the first chart, it is easy to jump to the conclusion that Facebook has been growing faster than Digg (isn’t quite so), so before you do, make sure you take a look at all the charts in this post.

The chart below overlays the same Facebook vs. Digg’s traffic data to their respective launch month’s:

• In their first 4 years of existence, Digg and Facebook have very similar curves
• Digg traffic has been greater than Facebook’s 33 out of 51 months (65%)
• Facebook’s recent growth and expansion strategies are paying off in a big big way. It is going to take a special effort from Digg to continue keep pace with and beating Facebook, a leap of imagination if you will. Facebook doubled traffic in its 5th year of existence, going from 28,487,293 to 73,787,766 unique visitors. Can Digg do the same in its fifth year?

Will Kevin Rose & team at Digg be able to innovate at the pace that is required? Innovation certainly beats size when in the battle to grow attention. Digg has a lot going for them, but only time will tell how ultimately successful and innovative they will be. I’ll certainly be watching intently.

Twitter may be relatively new in the social networking field, but with big leaps in traffic and visits and nearly 8,000,000 visitors to the website in February, it’s certainly making a splash. With a recent site redesign that gives users easy access to information about what users are talking about and the ability to search public posts (or “tweets”), Twitter could become a barometer for what’s hot in current events and on the web.

Twitter’s big draw is allowing users to “micro blog” by publicizing what they are up to or what’s on their minds (in 140 characters or less) to the people who follow their updates. On March 5th, Twitter began testing a search box in the navigation, as well as a link for “Twitter Trends” that tells you which topics are most talked about on Twitter right now.

Twitter Trends looks at what’s being talked about right now—in the case of this screenshot, what was being talked about on March 11th at about 11 a.m. Although this is interesting to track, I wanted to take a look at what people were actively looking for using Twitter Search, a feature launched in July 2008.

Prior to March 5th, the Search function could only be accessed by typing “search.twitter.com” into the browser, or by clicking a link at the very bottom of the page on the Twitter site. Still, popularity of this feature has been climbing steadily over the last few months, as shown in the chart below.

Those using the search function tend to be more interested in what’s hot in the technological and marketing world than the current events-oriented topics that show up in Twitter Trends. The table below shows the top search terms Twitter users have searched on since search began in July 2008.

Though Obama and iPhone make the list, the top 10 terms are dominated by individuals, companies, and unique websites that are not household names.

• Sleep.fm is a social alarm clock that allows people to set their own alarms for whatever they may need.
• Chris Knight is CEO of ezinearticles, which is a popular website on which authors can publish articles and email newsletter publishers can search a database of articles for their newsletter. Ezinearticles.com also, of course, allows anyone to go to the site and read articles of interest to them.
• TheSixtyOne is a website for music lovers, designed to allow musicians to upload their music and have thousands of listeners rate their songs.
• Gary Vaynerchuk (GaryVee) is the Director of Operations at Wine Library in Springfield, NJ, and has his own video blog in which he tastes and reviews wines.
• AJ Vaynerchuk (AJV) is the co founder (along with GaryVee) of PleaseDressMe, a t-shirt search engine which also features a t-shirt of the day.
• FollowFriday is a Twitter tag (denoted by the “#”) which users can employ to promote other Twitterers by including “#followfriday” in their tweets with “the name of Twitter users [they would] like others to follow.”

So what do all these top search terms have in common? They all use twitter aggressively as part of their marketing strategy. Twitter has helped connect these people and companies to a broader audience, creating buzz and curiosity about who and what they are.

The most searched top ten list is likely to change, however, if this testing of search in the navigation goes well and we see a full roll out. When a larger audience uses the search feature, we will begin to get a better picture of what interests the masses. This is definitely something I will explore after a couple of months of broader usage.

Until then, I’ll use Twitter Trends to keep track of what people are talking about—which, as of right now (Thursday March 12th), are #unleash, Willis Tower, #sxsw, Google Voice, and Ellen.

Recently, there was quite some media buzz and chatter amongst the bloggers about Facebook’s updated Terms of Use. This led many Facebook users to question their privacy and rights on the website. Was the effect of these concerns far reaching, or was this simply a case of media hysteria? Let’s begin by looking at a timeline of events.

This latest Facebook saga began on February 4th, when Facebook updated its Terms of Use to state that Facebook was granted licensing rights to content published by its users on the Facebook domain, even in the event of a user deactivating their account. Future politicians of the world trembled at the thought of their past online identity coming back to haunt them: How would they ever explain those college photos displaying them in an inebriated state? By mid-month the story had picked up steam in the wake of media coverage and privacy advocate backlash, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg was forced to respond publicly to the growing concerns on February 16th, using the Facebook blog. Two days after his response, Facebook reverted their Terms of Use and once again gave ownership of the published content (all those pictures and videos) back to the Facebook user. To go a step further, on February 26th, Facebook published two new governing documents on Proposed Facebook Principles and Proposed Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. However, as of the end of February, not many people were taking the time to read these proposals – less than 0.2% of the Facebook population.

So, where did the Facebook user fit into this ordeal? Did Joe College or my office cube mate really care? I would say they did.

During the period of time where media coverage was at its height, and Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg responded to the growing concerns, Facebook users were taking the time to read the Term’s of Use. In fact, traffic to this part of the site grew 237% W-O-W.

The chart above shows the weekly unique volume of Facebook users reading the Terms of Use. And while the change in Terms occurred in the 2nd week depicted in the chart (2/1-2/7), the spike in volume happened during that third week of February – which makes sense because this is when the media grabbed the story. And I’m willing to bet that anyone reading this blog had at least one friend in their network tweet about this or publish a story on their Facebook wall.

The negativity also seemed, for a short while anyways, to have an ill effect on the number of deactivations of Facebook accounts. Facebook users who began the deactivation process grew 35% W-O-W in this same week in February (2/15 – 2/21) – the week that captured all the buzz. This accounted for 0.5% of all Facebook users, up 30% from the week prior.

After the Terms of Use were restored to the users’ (and media’s) liking, behavior seemed to return to normal. This indicates that while it did attract some attention, this event did not seem to soil either Facebook’s image or its continued growth in the space. When all was said and done: High School kids went on gossiping; College kids went on posting party pics; Mom’s continued stalking their children. All was right in Facebook world.