January 3, 2012 by claudia.smith
The global online marketing intelligence service Experian Hitwise has published it’s list of the most popular search queries posted in 2011 in the US, with social media sites topping the poll. The survey analysed the top 1,000 search terms of last year and (perhaps unsurprisingly) Facebook is once again head of the list for the third consecutive year.
In both 2011 and 2010 Facebook held four of the top ten search queries posted, with the search term ‘facebook’ recorded by Experian Hitwise as the number one most searched term for both years. The total query volume for all the Facebook terms featured on the top ten list, grew by 33 percent in comparison to last year.
The social media sites preeminence comes as little surprise with the growing popularity of digital media marketing across industries; the world’s most popular social networking site now has over 800 million active users with over 50% logging in to Facebook on a daily basis, it’s not hard to see why marketers have jumped on the proverbial digital media marketing bandwagon. According to the Hitwise blog post their statistics also revealed exponential growth in the number of people searching for the social networking site in 2011:
“Analysis of the search terms revealed that social networking-related terms dominated the results, accounting for 4.18 percent of the top 50 searches. This is an increase of 12 percent compared with 2010. When combined, common search terms for Facebook – e.g., facebook and facebook.com – accounted for 3.48 percent of all searches in the United States among the top 50 terms, which represents a 33 percent increase compared with 2010.”
While the latest statistics from Experian Hitwise demonstrate the increasing popularity of social platforms such as Facebook and YouTube (Google’s broadcasting site found itself in second position on the Hitwise poll), which may have firmly established themselves in the consciousness of worldwide users and businesses alike, MySpace’s epic fall from grace was notable by the site’s absence from the top ten search queries of last year; dropping from number 5 in 2010, and the only website that had appeared in the 2010 but not the 2011 listings, apparently displaced by ‘yahoo.com’ making an entry and joining ‘Yahoo’ at number six.
The findings will no doubt add fuel to the Google and Facebook digital media marketing fire, with the search engine giant seeing an increase in the number of searches last year, however according to the Hitwise poll, Google is still lagging behind Zuckerberg’s social site and it’s dominant position:
“YouTube terms accounted for 1.36 percent, representing a 21 percent increase compared with 2010. Google terms (including YouTube) accounted for 1.59 percent – an increase of 27 percent compared with 2010.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Facebook does not appear on the “top lists” published by search engines Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask or AOL, due to the criteria used when collating their lists; when it comes to Google’s at least, their top 10 search queries are based on “rising” search terms, rather than those that prove the most popular overall.
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