1 in every 5 minutes online is being spent on social networks (and more data from ComScore’s 2011 Social Report)

I’ve finally gotten around to reading ComScore’s 2011 Social Report that came out in late December. There are some great, granular pieces of data taken from March 2007-October 2011.

Some key stats:

Social Networking is the most popular online activity. 1 in every 5 minutes of time online is now being spent on social networking sites (up from only 6% in early 2007), reaching 1.2 billion people total.
Facebook is important. Facebook takes up the largest part of this time, reaching 55% of the worlds’ online population in October. Facebook also has incredibly high engagement, with 3 out of every 4 minutes of users’ time on social networks being spent on it instead of other networks, and taking up every seventh minute of people’s total time online.
Twitter has grown by 59% in the past year and reaches 160 million monthly unique users worldwide.
Microblogging is making a run. LinkedIn has grown by 55% to nearly 100 million, while Tumblr is up 172% to nearly 40 million. Google+ now has 65 million users worldwide.
More and more people want to share around interests, not just the close social relationships.
Social Networks are continuing to reach all age groups, not just the youngins. The 55+ age group continues to be the fastest growing demographic in terms of social network usage, which increased by almost 10% since July 201.
Women continue to lead men in engagement across the world — by 2 hours or 30% per month in North America and Europe.
What about email? Email usage has been declining in usage among younger age groups, a trend that’s not likely to change.

Some more specific stats:

People in Latin America spend a noticeably large amount of their time - 28% - online on sites like Facebook and Twitter. This number is only 11% in Asia.
But hold on, in that percentage for Asia, the Philippines is actually the most socially networked country in the world, with 43% of users time being spent on social networks.
Israelis spend the most time on social networking sites, with 11.1 hours devoted to them in the month of October (2011)