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Facebook’s share of the UK online usage has fallen by more than seven percentage points in the last year- raising concerns that it may have hit saturation point.The social network – which is expected to make an initial public offering (IPO) this year – still attracted significantly more online time than its nearest competitor, accounting for 52.6pc of all visits to social networks in December.

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.

Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal’s Kingdom Holding Company has announced a £200 million investment in Twitter.The investment follows “several months of negotiations”, a company statement to the Saudi stock exchange said.

The prince, who is one of the world’s richest men, owns stakes in many well-known companies, including News Corporation.

He also has investments in a number of media groups in the Arab world.

“Our investment in Twitter reaffirms our ability in identifying suitable opportunities to invest in promising, high-growth businesses with a global impact,” Prince Alwaleed said.

Twitter has redesigned its service layout giving companies a greater presence on its network.The company said the enhancements would make Twitter a more “compelling destination” for brands.

The firm depends on its relationship with advertisers. At present its main source of revenue is “promoted” tweets, accounts and trends sold for cash.

A spokeswoman for Twitter said the main goal of the revamp was to make the service more simple and easy to use, rather than to focus on brands.

“If users don’t want to see a brand’s page, then they can just not visit it,” said Rachel Bremer.

The so-called “brand pages” will bring Twitter in line with similar features offered by Facebook and Google+.

A new “discover” feature highlights content from Twitter based on a user’s interests and location, an enhancement of the site’s existing hashtag system.

“We’ve simplified the design to make it easier than ever to follow what you care about, connect with others and discover something new,” the company said in a blog post.

“You’ll see this new design both on Twitter.com and mobile phones, so that you’ll have a familiar experience any time, anywhere.”

The company said an update to its standalone app Tweetdeck would also be made available. Twitter bought the UK-developed tweeting software for £25 million in May.

Twitter said that the upgrade would be rolled out to all users “in the next few weeks”. The new features can be accessed earlier by downloading the firm’s updated mobile app.

Several brands have partnered with Twitter for the launch including Coca-Cola, Disney, Nike and McDonald’s.

The redesign allows companies more customisation over the look of their pages and the ability to show embedded multimedia.

Visits to video sharing websites by UK users have gone up by more than a third in the last year.The biggest driver of traffic to those sites is music videos (33%), followed by TV shows (17%), film (11%), gaming (10%) and news (9%).

The figures, from internet research company Experian Hitwise, show YouTube accounts for nearly 70% of all video website hits.

It’s now the third most popular site in the UK after Google and Facebook.

Lady Gaga was the most in demand for artist within music searches.

The research was gathered between September 2010 and September 2011.

During that time 240 million hours every month were spent by British internet users watching videos online.

UK’s top 10 websites:

Google UK
Facebook
YouTube
eBay UK
Windows Live Mail
MSN UK
Google.com
BBC News
BBC Homepage
Yahoo! UK & Ireland

Research by Experian Hitwise

Illustrating its dominance in this area, Google owned YouTube, clocked up 184 million of those hours.

That number is still dwarfed by the amount of time spent on social networking sites though.

The same research shows 800 million hours were spent each month on sites like Facebook and Twitter by the UK’s internet users.

Despite YouTube’s dominance of video sharing websites there was also strong growth for other ones too.

BBC iPlayer, the second most popular video site, experienced a 22% rise in traffic last year.

That means the number of visits to the site has doubled in the last three years.

The millions of tweets posted on Twitter are being analysed by hedge fund managers to predict share price patterns.Traders have used an awareness of the population’s collective emotions to predict price movements for years.

However, experts found that the instant nature of Twitter meant that those emotions could be gauged more accurately.

Previously, it had been thought that a drop in the markets led to more negative feelings but it proved to be the other way around.

Analysts at Derwent Capital Markets in Mayfair, central London, have launched a £25m fund that makes its investments by evaluating whether people are generally happy, sad, anxious or tired, because they believe it will predict whether the market will move up or down.

The program was originally designed by Johan Bollen, professor of informatics and computing at Indiana University.

It takes a random 10% of all Twitter feeds and uses two methods to collate the data.

One compares positive with negative comments and the other uses a program designed by Google to define six moods calm, alert, sure, vital, kind and happy.

In a study published last October, Bollen used the social networking site to predict the direction of the movement of the Dow Jones in New York with 87.6% accuracy.

Mr Bollen’s algorithms flag up key emotive words when they appear in a certain order.

He told the Sunday Times: “We recorded the sentiment of the online community, but we couldn’t prove if it was correct. So we looked at the Dow Jones to see if there was a correlation. We believed that if the markets fell, then the mood of people on Twitter would fall.

“But we realised it was the other way round — that a drop in the mood or sentiment of the online community would precede a fall in the market. That was a eureka moment.  It meant we could predict the change in the market and that gives you a considerable edge.”

Paul Hawtin, Derwent’s founder and fund manager, has an exclusive contract with Bollen to use his technology.

Mr Hawtin told the newspaper: “Investors have always accepted that markets are driven by sentiment, mainly fear and greed. When people are greedy the markets go up and when they are fearful they go down.

“When sentiment dropped, and people tweeted about feeling tight on money, were worried or anxious, the markets would crash two or three days later.”

It is not the only such tool on the market.

WiseWindow, a data provider in California, boils down the online input of 100m social networking comments every month for its clients.

Twitter has said that the number of active users have passed the 100 million mark.The company’s chief executive told a news conference it was preparing to increase its business range by broadening the areas of its service where adverts appear.

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.”

Police say they stopped rioters after monitoring intelligence on social networks like Twitter and BlackBerry Messaging (BBM).Assistant Met Police Commissioner Lynne Owens told a committee of MPs officers learned of possible trouble via Twitter and Blackberry messenger.

He said they provided intelligence but could also be misleading.

A number of politicians, media commentators and members of the police force have suggested that Twitter and Blackberry Messenger (BBM) had a role to play in the riots.

The BBM system is popular among many young people because it is both private and secure – users are invited to join each other’s contacts list using a unique PIN, although once they have done so, messages can be distributed to large groups.

Ms Owens said officers had been attempting to sift through an “overwhelming” amount of “chitter chatter” on social networks during last week’s riots in London, but some had proved vital.

“Through Twitter and BBM there was intelligence that the Olympic site, that both Westfields [shopping centres] and Oxford Street were indeed going to be targeted,” she told the home affairs select committee. We were able to secure all those places and indeed there was no damage at any of them.”

Not only are RIM (Research in Motion, Blackberry’s owner) the most secure messaging operator, they’re also the most fastidious – they log everything. If you were a looter using a Blackberry, you’re going to get found out.

The police have the power to serve RIM with an order to reveal information. Under the same law, RIM are barred from disclosing whether they’ve done so or not.

But although RIM can’t say it themselves, I can say with confidence that they’ll be doing everything they can to help. It’s a reputation issue – these people are a tiny minority of their users and they want the remainder to see them doing all they can to track them down.

RIM don’t need to reveal the actual contents of messages in order do that. They can tell police who sent a message to whom and when. The police can then ask the network operators where that was done – and the sum total will probably be enough to be used as evidence.

If you know a Blackberry belonging to a suspect sent a message to 45 other Blackberries and then those 45 owners all turn up in Ealing or Tottenham an hour later, it’s clear what’s going on.

And while much of the information coming via social media “was obviously wrong and rather silly”, he said police did considered trying to shut the networks down in order to prevent them being used to organise further violence.

Blackberry has offered to co-operate with police investigating the riots – prompting attacks by hackers angry that the company could be prepared to hand over user data to authorities.

Google has launched a new social media offering entitled Plus (that’s +) – to mixed reviews.A number of people have been researching Google Plus and whilst there is disagreement it seems to be a qualified success.

At first glance many people will dismiss Google Plus as a derivative of Facebook. This was also true of the ill-fated Buzz.

But this is a much better and more thoughtfully designed product than Buzz- with better security settings.

Accordingly the interface is familiar and relatively intuitive but Google Plus still takes some getting used to.

Some have already criticised Google Plus as a “reactive” product, simply mimicking Facebook with some security tweaks.

Google’s radically different product Google Wave crashed and burned because people didn’t really know what it was or how to use it.

It was too scary unfamiliar. Plus plays it safer and is less of a departure from the known universe of social media tools (Facebook, Twitter) than Wave was from email, for example.

Google has learned the painful lesson of Buzz and has taken enormous pains to attend to privacy in the overall design and experience of the product.

It’s very easy to add people and organize them into standard or customized groups. This is one of the things that immediately impressed me, as well as the attention to privacy and selective sharing.

There’s lots of control over who sees what updates, etc. You’re also able filter all messages and updates by category to see only those from “friends” or “professional” contacts. On the Plus homepage you can click down the list and get selective views from each of your groups:

Users can create and manage groups (“Circles”) very easily once you understand how Plus is organized. This takes relatively little time.

Google says Plus isn’t a Facebook competitor. “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”

Whether or not it’s intended as a Facebook competitor, it’s definitely not a “Facebook killer.” However its privacy controls and selective group communication tools will appeal to some turned off by Facebook’s aggressive pushing of privacy boundaries and buttons.

Twitter’s UK audience jumped by a third in May 2011 following the Ryan Giggs super injunction leaks, which drove a huge number of female pensioners to the site.As a result of the Ryan Giggs super injunction row social media company Twitter enjoyed its highest ever UK audience last month, with 6.1 million British people visiting the site, up 34 per cent on April’s figures, says Nielsen-UKOM, a UK online measurement company.

Twitter’s monthly audience boost was helped by a 65 per cent increase in the number of over 50s men, aged between 50 to 64, accessing the site, and a doubling in the number of female pensioners (the over 65’s) going to Twitter.com to see the latest in the super-injunction row.

Both LinkedIn and Facebook also enjoyed record audience figures last month, also driven by a surge in their popularity amongst the over 50s age group.

During May 2011, 26.8 million Britons visited Facebook, which is the highest ever audience figure the social network has attracted in the UK, propelling it for the first time above MSN, Microsoft’s news and email hub, making it the second most popular site in the country behind Google.

According to the Nielsen-UKOM figures, LinkedIn registered 3.6 million visits during May 2011, up 57 per cent on the same month last year.

Two years ago in the UK the profile of Facebook’s audience was skewed towards 18 to 34 year olds. However, the number of 50 to 64 year olds visiting the site has grown 84 per cent in the last 24 months.

While the number of UK visitors to the three biggest social networks continues to rise, the amount of time these audiences are spending on these sites is more mixed.

The average visitor to Facebook and LinkedIn is spending a little longer on those sites each month than they were two years ago, while the average visitor to Twitter appears to be spending a little less.

The latest social media network UK traffic figures for May 2011 have just been released by Hitwise.From: Hitwise social media network uk traffic figures May 2011

The overall result is that traffic to both YouTube and Twitter has increased whilst Facebook’s dominance of social media has declined.

This month’s search and social analysis release confirmed some interesting trends in the Social Networking and Forums category, including a bumper month of traffic for Twitter, continuing growth for YouTube and a declining market share for Facebook.

Last month Hitwise noted the growth of YouTube and how the video website now accounts for 1 in every 5 visits to all social networking sites. In May YouTube continued its growth, accounting for 20.52% of all visits to the Social Networks and Forums category.

Meanwhile Twitter had its biggest month of traffic ever, in part because of the super-injunction revelations, but also because the micro-blogging platform has carved a niche for itself as an excellent platform through which Internet users can share and consume news.

Recent examples like the death of Osama Bin Laden, the Egypt crisis and the resurgence of the ash cloud have all been shared and discussed on Twitter.

What’s interesting is that the growth of YouTube and Twitter is coming at the expense of Facebook.

Since the beginning of 2011, Facebook’s market share of visits within the Social Networks and Forums category has fallen from nearly 58% to hover around the 54% mark.

Despite the drop in market share in recent months, Facebook needn’t panic. Although its market share is declining slightly, Facebook still commands over half of the visits to the fastest growing category online, and having a slightly smaller proportion of an ever increasing pie is still a very healthy place to be.

However, it does raise the question: has Facebook now finished its growth phase in the UK? This is something that Dr Search will continue to monitor closely over the coming months and confirms our blog post of a couple of days ago when I posted: Facebook faces saturation claims as growth stops