Time spent social networking is increasing as per research from Nielsen Wire.Some interesting points from the research are

Total minutes increasing 82% year-over-year
Average time per person increasing 67% year-over-year in May 2009.
Twitter.com was the fastest-growing Web brand in May 2009, up 1,448% year over- year.
Average time per person on Twitter increased 175 percent year-over-year, from 6 minutes and 19 seconds in May 2008 to 17 minutes and 21 seconds in May 2009.
With 144.3 million unique visitors, Facebook was the No. 1 global social networking destination in May 2009 for the 7th month in a row.

Myspace.com continued as the top social networking …read more

Social networking is growing in importance within the business world. Emarketer has published social networking research showing that a third of CEO’s are on Facebook, almost a third also see it as important as are using it to build their brands.

There are risks with social networking though as the research shows. Social networking can be bad for your brands health! But I think this happens when companies ignore rather than embrace social networks, when they ban people from using them rather than educating people on the power of the networks on their brands, when companies don’t realise that brand engagement …read more

Knowledge Networks has produced a report entitled INTERNET USERS TURN TO SOCIAL MEDIA TO SEEK ONE ANOTHER, NOT BRANDS OR PRODUCTS.
Now I was shocked when I read this report intially as previous statistics has shown that if friends recommend a product then almost 2/3rds of readers would likely click through to the product or service. The report shows

83% of the Internet population (ages 13 to 54) participates in social media – 47% on a weekly basis
Less than 5% of social media users regularly turn to these sites for guidance on purchase decisions in any of nine product/service categories.
16% of social …read more