UK Users With 24 Hour Online Habit!

Business owners could be rubbing their hands with the currently popular ‘glee’, at the latest UK web user figures, which indicate their online marketing efforts were worth the investment as we spend more of our lives online!

The latest survey of the country’s Internet habits reveal that the UK spends the majority of their online time engaged in social media networking – up to 65% more time online than three years ago!

According to the UK Online Measurement company (UKOM), the average internet user spends 22 hours and 15 minutes on the net each month, with nearly a quarter of the users’ time spent on the most popular online activities, comprising social networks, blogs, communication and playing games.

As a result, use of Instant Messaging (IM) has fallen to just 5% from 14% of online time, three years ago. However, the good news for email marketing is that email, which was predicted to suffer as more people used Facebook and its rivals, is still healthy and accounts for 7.2% of time compared to 6.5% of time, three years ago.

Further encouragement to business investment in advertising their brand identity via online marketing strategies such as SEO and PPC is shown by the increased use of online classified adverts and auctions, accounting now for 4.7% of user time.

Strong growth in 2.8% of online time spent browsing news sites – more than time spent on adult sites – also compares favourably to just 1.5%, three years ago.

The survey divided the internet into 85 different sections and the time spent viewing adult content shows in the top 10 and remains one of the most heavily used sectors

The UKOM Survey – Percentage of user time spent online at each sector:
• Social networks/blogs – 22.7%
• E-mail – 7.2%
• Games – 6.9%
• Instant Messaging – 4.9%
• Classified/Auctions – 4.7%
• Portals – 4%
• Search – 4%
• Software info/products – 3.4%
• News – 2.8%
• Adult – 2.7%