Facebook: 10 key facts

Ahead of Facebook’s IPO tomorrow, here are 10 key facts about the social network from Experian Hitwise:

• There are over 1.3 billion visits to Facebook a month from the UK internet population – making Facebook the second most visited website in the UK after Google.

• One in every seven page views in the UK is to a Facebook page. The social network accounted for 14% of all UK Internet page views in April 2012.

• 500 million hours are spent on Facebook in the UK every month. The average session time for a user visiting Facebook is 22 minutes.

• Facebook is the most popular social network in the UK, accounting for 50% of all visits to social networks. Facebook is twice the size of YouTube and 17 times bigger than Twitter in terms of visits from UK Internet users.

• Facebook receives an average of 40 million UK internet visits every single day.

• Facebook is the most searched for website in UK. The term ‘facebook’ is the most popular search term typed into all search engines including Google, Yahoo! and Bing and three of the top 10 most popular search terms online are Facebook related (‘facebook’, ‘facebook login’ and ‘fb’).

• Facebook is the second biggest source of traffic in the UK after Google. 7% of all visits to a website came from Facebook in April 2012.

• One Facebook fan = 20 additional visits to your website over the course of a year. Using the top 100 retail websites as a sample group, Hitwise data shows that for each additional fan acquired on a branded Facebook page companies can expect to see 20 extra visits coming to their main website over a 12 month period.

• 25% of all visits leaving Facebook go straight to an entertainment website, showing the close affinity between Facebook and people’s interest in movies, TV, music and games.

• Manchester is the new Facebook capital of the UK with internet users from Manchester 9% more likely than the average person to visit Facebook in a given month.

Additional Facebook Insight – data from Techlightenment:

• There are over 300,000 Facebook pages with 10,000+ fans, which account for 36 billion individual user likes across them. This excludes the many millions of smaller pages – according to Facebook’s SEC filing there are 37 million with 10+ fans. It also excludes all the likes that occur on open graph website content and within news reading applications as well as application installs and likes on friends’ content.

• There are 215 pages with 10million+ fans (accounting for 4.5 billion user likes between them), and 4,700 with one million+ page likes (accounting for 14.5 billion likes between them).

• An average Facebook user has 100+ likes associated with their profile, but this number is highly correlated with age – the younger you are, the more likes you normally have. 20 year olds typically have 300+ likes in their profile, and 1000+ is not uncommon.

• Facebook pages belong to one of Facebook’s 198 page categories. Musicians and bands are the most popular types of pages on Facebook. They account for 20% of the top 1,000 Facebook pages, and 10% of Facebook pages with 10k+ fans. The most popular music genres on Facebook are rock, pop and hip hop

• The most popular TV genre is news with 1.8million likes more than music which has 1.7 million likes