metapeople Hong Kong

Nielsen announced today a set of impressive new social media statistics - in December 2009, consumers spent 82 percent more time on social networking sites compared to the same period a year ago.

The average global consumer now spends more than 5 and 1/2 hours on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, up from 3 hours in December 2008. In correlation, the overall traffic to social networking sites by unique visitors increased as well from 242 millions to 307 millions.

The statistics deducted at global consumers, however, it only refer to a select group of countries, including U.S., U.K., Australia, Brazil, Japan, Switzerland, Germany, France, Spain and Italy.