However, Facebook has lost substantial ground since the previous December, when it took a 58.5pc share of the UK’s social networking market, according to data from Experian Hitwise.

It slipped 1.3 percentage points last month alone.

The decline has raised concerns that Facebook is running out of steam in the markets where it is best established, whilst its competitors gain ground.

“Facebook’s growth is levelling out,” said James Murray, market research analyst at Experian. “Because Facebook had such a clear lead, it was always going to be difficult for Facebook to maintain [its position]. It has probably reached near enough its maximum growth.”

The figures will come as a blow to the company, which has been investing heavily in extending its reach and enticing users to click on its adverts, ahead of its long-awaited IPO. Facebook is expected to float with a possible valuation of  £65 billion ($100 billion)- the biggest technology IPO ever.

By contrast, YouTube, the user-generated video site owned by Google, grew its traffic by 45pc last year.

It accounted for just over a quarter of all UK visits to social networks in December, putting it 7.4 percentage points ahead of the previous year.

“We’re expecting video to be even more influential as a marketing channel, and marketers will have to adapt their strategies to incorporate a multi-channel approach in order to secure customers both on and offline,” said Mr Murray.

Twitter and Yahoo! Answers also made gains, but remained tiny by comparison, with 3pc and 2pc of all visits to social networks respectively.

Google’s social network, Google +, did not register in the top 10 most visited social networks at all.

However, Google grew its share of search engine usage market in the UK, edging up from a 91.3pc share of the market to 91.8pc.

Microsoft, its nearest competitor, was a minnow by comparison. Its suite of sites accountted for 3.6pc of all search engine visits in the UK in December, whilst Yahoo!’s popularity for searches fell nearly a percentage point to 2.5pc.

The updates were revealed at Facebook’s annual F8 developer conference.

A wave of new features in recent weeks have been welcomed by some users and caused annoyance to many others.

Facebook’s latest changes point to a desire to keep users engaged through new features, in the midst of rapid innovation from social networking rivals.

The site’s application platform has been redesigned to allow users to share what they are consuming on streaming music services such as Spotify, and the movie rental site Netflix.

Depending on privacy settings, users will be able to see what friends are doing – for example, playing a song – then listen-in themselves.

Mr Zuckerberg said he wanted to create, what he called, “real time serendipity”.

“Being able to click on someone’s music is a great experience, but knowing you helped a friend discover something new and they liked your taste in music, and that you now have that in common is awesome,” he added.

Facebook said that users would only be able to do as much on the site as its media partners allowed in each country, so free music sharing through streaming apps would only work where that service was already available outside Facebook.

Alongside the deeper integration of media content, the restyling of Facebook’s profile pages is also likely to prove a hot topic among users.

Identities will now be defined through a densely packed vertical timeline of major life events, made up of photos, videos and other items. The level of detail diminishes the further down a reader scrolls.

Profile pages had previously been limited to basic information along with a stream of every single item posted by a user.

Facebook stressed that all of its new offerings could be controlled by members using its recently simplified privacy controls.

In particular, it stressed that timeline items could be modified within the new “activity log”, allowing users to limit who can view certain events from their past.

The updates are expected to start appearing on users’ computers in coming weeks.

Meanwhile, online video has become a career for thousands of video creators, with some making hundreds of thousands of dollars each year.

As online video viewership has grown – YouTube draws 500 million unique visitors each month – marketers hope to take advantage of the dedicated audiences and low barriers to entry.

Video creators in turn are making money from hosting sites such as YouTube, DailyMotion and Blip.tv, which share a portion of the profits derived from video and banner advertisements.

YouTube, for one, has distributed millions of dollars in advertising revenue to its 20,000 most popular amateur producers since 2007.

A still from an episode of Annoying Orange on Blip.tv Blip.tv, which hosts the Annoying Orange comedy show describes its content as “the best in original web series”

“We share millions of dollars with our partners every year,” said Tom Sly, the site’s head of strategic partner development.

The amount advertisers pay varies with the popularity and quality of the videos, with creators receiving as much as $20 (£12.70) per thousand views.

“Across the board we’re seeing those numbers increase as we see higher quality content and the ability to target users so that advertisers have more fine-grained control,” Mr Sly said.

In 2010, the number of YouTube partners making over $1,000 (£600) per month from advertising revenue went up 300%, the company said.

The company declined to release specific figures, but Mr Sly said “hundreds” of video creators make more than $100,000 a year and “thousands” make more than $10,000 a year.

The top performing web shows on Blip.tv are on target to take in more than $1m in advert revenue each, said Eric Mortensen, senior director of programming.

“There are certain class of people, and it’s not that they are rejecting TV, they never even thought to be like TV in the first place,” he said. “And because of that they are doing new and different things and that’s how they end up making money.”

Industry analysts say that online video audiences are loyal and attentive and feel a connection to the creators.

In addition to advert revenue sharing, some video creators make as much as $150,000 a year by cutting sponsorship deals with major companies, said former YouTube executive George Strompolos, founder of Fullscreen, a start-up that aims to facilitate connections between corporate sponsors and video creators.

Aware of the power of recommendations from such seemingly personal relationships, companies like Ford, GE, and Lancome are directly reaching out to video makers to hawk their products.

Online video creators work without the need for teams of agents, managers, markets and developers, Mr Strompolos said.

“Online video tends to be a one-stop shop solution,” Mr Strompolos said.  “You get not only the creative development and the authenticity of voice you’re looking for, but you also get distribution and reach.”

As the online video advertising and merchandising infrastructures become more sophisticated, analysts say more and more people are likely to strike out on their own in web video.

This is becoming the new television- a place where the average person has a much better chance of getting noticed and making money than if they were to go the traditional route via Hollywood.

Alan Lastufka, author of YouTube: An Insider’s Guide to Climbing the Charts, said: “The money may not always be headline-worthy, but it’s enough to quit your day job, stay in the basement on your computer and spend your time connecting with fans.”

Twitter has said that the number of active users have passed the 100 million mark.

But Dick Costolo also said he wanted the business to remain independent.

He said active users, who log on at least once a month, rose 82% this year. Half of these 100 million log on at least once a day.

Twitter raised £250 million in venture capital funding this summer.

Mr Costolo said: “We want to be able to remain independent, grow the business the way we want to, and not be beholden to public markets until we feel like we want to be.”

The company began showing adverts in limited areas of its service in 2010. But it is concerned that commercialisation sometimes alienates users of social media.

Mr Costolo said the results had exceeded Twitter’s expectations: “We now feel that based on the engagement rates we’re seeing… that we’re ready to expand this further.”

Twitter plans to allow adverts on its service known as promoted tweets.

Previously, promoted tweets, such as a message promoting a coffee chain, would only appear if the user already followed that particular company.

Mr Costolo said the business could work relying solely on advertising income: “It’s our firm belief that our advertising platform is the only revenue component that we need to have in the market in order to be a huge independent business.”

All businesses make mistakes – but how those mistakes are handled may often decide whether the business retains or loses its customers.

Identifying enough potential customers who have the requirement for the goods and services on offer, is the primary problem for every business. Having identified the potential customers, the next difficulty is to convert them into customers that pay for their goods and services.

It often costs businesses more than they realise in order to gain a new customer – and considerably more than it does to retain them, so it is surprising how businesses can often take a casual attitude to their customer relations and to retaining customers for their repeat business.

Gaining and retaining customers is a privilege not a right. Customers don’t have to give their business and they are not obliged to remain customers, especially if the marketplace is filled with competing offers for products and services.

Maintaining customers depends largely on how the product or service is delivered.

As a minimum standard customers should always receive their goods and services at the price agreed and delivered in the manner and time expected. This is certainly the case in business to business transactions, where delivery to price and specification have particular importance to companies involved in manufacturing, or where their supplies inventories work on “just in time” deliveries.

From time to time, mistakes will be made – products may fail to meet their specification, deliveries are incorrect or are late, or perhaps there are mistakes in the invoicing.

When a customer complains, the customer is not always right.

But customer complaints need initially to be treated in the first place, as if the customer were right. It is easy for some employees not directly involved with the customer to treat such complaints as a nuisance, but complaints are a valuable source of information about how customers perceive the product and service  for which they are paying.

It is all too easy for  employees not directly in contact with the customer to be unaware of how their actions can alienate both potential and existing customers; for example a delivery not being made on time, a credit level exceeded that prevents delivery, incomplete orders.

When such events occur, provided that customers are informed of the problem at the earliest opportunity and kept informed about progress to its resolution, the harm to customer relations will be minimised.

The worst situation is to not inform the customer of any problem, but allow the customer to find out the hard way, which may create problems for the customer, and breaks the trust of reliability between the customer and supplier.

For managers responsible for getting and retaining business, it is important to ensure that all employees understand that however remote their jobs appear to be from a direct relationship with the customers, their actions can have a significant role in the acquisition, retention or loss of a customer’s business.

Getting customers and retaining their custom is hard work which can easily be undone and negated by others who don’t appreciate the consequences foreseen or unforeseen of their activity or lack of it.

If a customer complains, and there is shown to be a problem, the first action is to admit it to the customer and apologise. It is the job of the manager responsible for getting and retaining business to investigate the complaint, its possible causes, and to provide a swift remedy for the problem. In doing so, managers should consider the following principals:

• Don’t assume that approved business procedures are followed, always check.
• Can procedures and policy it be verified?
• How do you know?

Managers who are responsible for getting and retaining business, must take ultimate responsibility when customers are lost through failings of company staff.

Managers must check that the policies, procedures and results are maintained by their employees, and be ready to help when foreseen and unforeseen problems arise that effect the customers.

All businesses make mistakes, but how those mistakes are handled may often decide whether the business retains or loses its customers.

From: http://businessperformancemaximized.com/it_is_easier_to_lose_business_than_to_get_it

Occasional sellers of personal items do not need to pay tax, but people earning a living as self employed traders may need to pay income tax, national insurance and VAT.

HMRC said the data it gleaned would be compared with its existing computerised records for income tax paid under self-assessment or PAYE, tax credits and national insurance.

“It shines a light onto previously hidden relationships, uncovering anomalies between such elements as bank interest, property income and lifestyle indicators before homing in on unexplained inconsistencies,” an HMRC spokesman said.

The taxman is also planning to launch more disclosure campaigns in this current tax year, aimed at specific groups of individuals, such as private tutors and fitness coaches, and tradesmen.

In the past couple of years the authorities have been making special efforts to get doctors and dentists, plumbers, and more recently restaurateurs, to come clean and pay the right tax.

HMRC first used computer software four years ago to track down tax-dodging internet traders on eBay.

Tens of thousands of people are thought to make part or all of their living by selling goods on online market places.

As of May 2011, 13% of online adults use the status update service Twitter.

That represents a significant increase from the 8% of online adults who identified themselves as Twitter users the first time Pew Research asked their “stand-alone” question about Twitter adoption in November 2010.
For the first time in their May 2011 survey, they also included a follow-up question asking cell phone-owning Twitter users if they access the service on their phones and found that half (54%) access the service in this way.

Due to sample size limitations, they were unable to provide detailed statistics on mobile Twitter usage by different demographic groups.

Twitter usage by those ages 25-44 has grown significantly since late 2010
Although young adults continue to have relatively high rates of Twitter usage, the number of 30-49 year olds who use the service has doubled since late 2010 — from 7% of such users in November to 14% in May 2011.

This growth trend is especially pronounced among 25-34 year olds.

Twitter use for this cohort roughly doubled between November 2010 and May 2011, from 9% to 19%.

Although growth in Twitter use among internet users ages 35-44 was notable as well (from 8% in late 2010 to 14% in spring 2011).

By contrast, Twitter adoption over the same time period was stable among the youngest adults (those ages 18-24) who were the most likely to use the service in our first survey.

Pew’s research can be found at: http://pewresearch.org/twitter-users-demographics-research

Twitter experienced its highest ever volume of online traffic on Saturday, accounting for 0.54% of all UK Internet visits that day, or to put it in simpler terms: Twitter was responsible for 1 in every 184 Internet visits in the UK on Saturday.Twitter has been constantly in the news- mainly because Twitter has carved a niche for itself as an excellent platform through which Internet users can share and consume news.

Twitter’s success is based on it’s three key attributes- it’s free, quick and easy to use.

It’s the simplicity and the keyword focus of the social media website which makes it so successful

The political revolution in Egypt, the Japanese earthquake and the celebrity super-injunctions are just three big news stories from the last few months that have been shared, spread and commented on through Twitter.

Within the growth of Twitter, 12% of visits to the website are coming from new users.

To put that into context, 99.5% of visits to Facebook in the UK come from returning visitors, but Twitter continues to attract new users to its website every single day.

Facebook is clearly much bigger than Twitter (about 15 times bigger in terms of volume of visits) but Facebook’s growth in terms of new visitors (in the UK market at least) has been pretty static for some months now.

As Twitter continues its extraordinary growth, one thing that is interesting is that the micro-blogging platform is becoming more mainstream in terms of its user base.

Using Mosaic we can see the types of people that visit Twitter online.You can see that visits to Twitter in May 2011 (the red line) are much closer to the UK online population average (the blue line) than they were in May 2010 (the green line).

In particular Twitter relies less on visits from Liberal Opinions, New Homemakers and Upper Floor Living – groups which are characterised as young, mostly single people who like their gadgets.

Twitter is no longer purely in the domain of early-adopters; rather it is becoming a universal tool which is being used increasingly by all types of Internet users, regardless of their online preferences.

Original research by Hitwise

However, he has already made some changes to the focus of the business and Google’s senior personnel, in a bid to make the 23,000 strong company less bureaucratic.

Google has been consistently struggling to compete against Facebook and create a successful social product which can compete effectively for people’s time and personal data on the internet.

Last Friday Page sent out company wide memo informing them that 25% of their annual bonus will be tied to the success or failure of Google’s social strategy in 2011.

He wants all employees to be directly involved with Google’s social product releases and push them out to their family and friends, and give feedback to the company.

Since assuming the role he has also promoted six executives to Senior Vice President (SVP) positions, essentially dividing the company into six distinct business units, over which each SVP will have greater control.

They are: Alan Eustace (SVP of search), Vic Gundotra (SVP of social), Salar Kamangar (SVP of YouTube), Sundar Pichai (SVP of Chrome), Andy Rubin (SVP of mobile) and Susan Wojcicki (SVP of advertising).

Google’s latest social product release is Google + 1, a tool which allows people to rate search results and adverts around the engine, launched last week.

Twitter is to launch geographical tweets and a dashboard to let marketers access data about their followers.

He said promoted tweets that target users based on their location, will be available in 21 cities across the US and in more than 100 countries.

Bain also introduced the new ‘Follower Dashboard’, which shows how a brand’s followers have increased over time, breaks down their gender and location, and displays what interest they have shown.

When Amanda Levy, sales director at Twitter, came to the UK last October to discuss ad solutions for the platform with UK advertisers, she discussed the Twitter dashboard, which has now been rolled out.

The announcement comes a year after Twitter rolled out Promoted Tweets in the US, with early advertisers including Starbucks and Virgin America.

Its ad offering, which includes ‘Promoted Accounts’ is based around relevance, real time and resonance.

Twitter, which celebrated its fifth birthday last month , is understood to be considering creating Facebook type branded pages, which would allow advertisers to deliver targeted messages.