Is Britain Falling Out of Love with Facebook?

According to new statistics by Hitwise, a UK web analytics company, it seems that Britain might be falling out of love with Facebook as its growth has declined over the past six months. Though, we need to remember that Britain still has the second-largest membership of Facebook in the world, at 25 million. At the top of the list is the US, while Indonesia and Turkey follow Britain. Facebook is still the second most visited site in Britain, after Google, and accounts for one in every six web pages accessed in the country. Hitwise provides insights on how 8 million UK Internet users interact with more than 1 million websites, across 165+ industries; and its latest statistics are interesting as they seems to go against some of the attention grabbing headlines from July.

Last month Facebook signed up its 500 millionth member and the British government announced that it would be engaging with Facebook to access the 25 million UK members asking them for ideas and to vote on where cuts should be made. This UK government initiative is called, the Facebook 'Spending Challenge Channel' and is part of the government's drive to use new technology to 'crowd source' and get people involved in making policy. The Hitwise research makes the UK government's crowd source idea seem a little flat!

Other data by Hitwise's shows the average amount of time spent on Facebook by a Briton has decreased from 30 minutes in December 2009, to 27 minutes in July 2010. Robin Goad, Hitwise's research director said, "The figures show that Facebook is nearing its saturation point". Over the last five year's Facebook's market share of page views has trebled, but growth, over the last six months in Britain has slowed. In July there was a slight decline in share, but this could be due to seasonality - as the August to September back-to-school/college/university period is significant for Facebook, Goad explained.

However, we along with the UK government should not lose faith in Facebook, as more than a third of the entire population, now have Facebook accounts. The 18-25 age group is Britain's largest, and well over half of British users of the site are over 25 and 38 per cent are aged over 35.  Like the US, the UK also has a thriving number of older users with 7 per cent being over 55 - almost double the proportion in France and 12 times the level in Indonesia. British users are also fairly evenly split according to gender, with women outnumbering men by just 2.2 per cent overall. Women outnumber men in all the older age groups (above 35) while men outnumber women at ages 34 and below.

It seems while Britons may not be completely falling out of love with Facebook, they are very attracted to Twitter.com, where one in ten UK web users visit Twitter (data by comScore). On-line love is a very fickle thing!

Photo credit: 4_EveR_YounG