Facebook expectedly topped the ‘most searched term’ list in the U.S. consecutively for the third time. This was not all. The social networking site even earned the supremo position in the ‘most visited site by U.S. visitors’ list. The stats were noted by Experian Hitwise.
Talking about the ‘most searched term’ list, ‘Facebook’ as a term topped the list, but along with it, were other two related terms, which made into the top five list. They are ‘Facebook login’ and ‘Facebook.com’.
Earning a decent share in this list is not an easy task as billions and billions of terms are fighting to earn even a 0.001% share. In such circumstances, Facebook, as a term has a big hold on the terms in the U.S., as it earned a handsome 3.1% share of all searches.
Apart from the Facebook link, the other two in the top five list are YouTube and Craigslist.
Comparing the 2010 and 2011 ‘most searched term’ list, it noted that four out of the top five were still the same. The change was only as MySpace was out and Facebook.com grabbed a slot in the top five. MySpace not just had a drop but a severe drop as it was on the fifth position on this list in 2010, but in 2011, it failed to enter the top ten list too.
Talking about the other list, that is the ‘most visited site by U.S. users’ list, Facebook prided itself regaining the top slot in this category too. Google was still at the second spot, but YouTube leaped forward to jump on to the third position. Apart from the YouTube shift, there is no change in the top five list. Facebook ate up a share of 10.29 % of all site visits made by U.S. users in the time frame from January to November 2011. Google even had a slight shift in its share, as it moved up to 7.7 % of the total count. The most interesting here was the YouTube shift, which moved up to 3.17 %.
This list saw yet another Google property, that is YouTube, pushing down the yahoo websites to enter the top three on the list. This might be because YouTube of late has been in a number of news articles making innovations and collaborating efforts to keep things moving positively.
Google properties on the whole count up to 11.98 %, which might be more that Facebook, but Facebook is single handedly trying to reach the untamed heights and move over and above the total of the Google properties.
Noting these stats, Experian’s list has its basis on similar search insights from Bing, Google Zeitgeist, Ask.com and AOL.
Experian Hitwise GM Simon Bradstock wrote a statement, in which he explained the trends they saw this year and how marketers can benefit from this data:
“Navigational searches dominated the top search results as users typed in terms versus typing in the URL in the browser bar. Hitwise saw 11 percent growth of single-word searches in 2011 as terms like ‘face’ and ‘you’ made the top 50 searches. Marketers need to be particularly brand-savvy when managing their search optimization campaigns because of this behavior, which is a result of predictive search functionality across major search engines. Other top 2011 searches reflect ongoing fascination with celebrities online, and many of the top fast-moving searches centered on natural disasters or notable personalities passing away.”
The complete list can be viewed in the Hitwise press center, a link to the same is here.