While the sharp increase of Facebook in the Australian market is of extreme interest - the social networking utility moved into the top 20 websites visited in All Categories w/ending 28 July 2007 - the referral traffic between Facebook and LinkedIn, a tool for managing professional relationships, gives further insight into the scope of networking activity on Facebook.

Firstly - a chart tracking the growth of Facebook against MySpace and Bebo, where you’ll see that Facebook overtook Bebo for the first time in July 07:

In this chart here you'll see LinkedIn's downstream website traffic to Facebook increasing dramatically in the past quarter. In contrast, LinkedIn's referrals to MySpace and Bebo have either trended down or remained stagnant.

From this chart, I would begin to speculate that users are a) looking-up the professional details of friends and acquaintances from Facebook on LinkedIn or b) business-oriented in visiting both networks concurrently. I wouldn't go so far as to back up this BusinessWeek article which speculates that users could soon replace LinkedIn entirely with Facebook; Hitwise Clickstream data also indicates an increasing amount of traffic in the opposite direction from Facebook to LinkedIn.

Hitwise Demographics data lends some evidence to the argument that business users are accessing both networks. The bubble chart below shows in the top right-hand quadrant that LinkedIn and Facebook are both highly-indexed in the Mosaic Group A - Leading Lifestyles, the wealthiest segment online, and Group D - Fashionably Wired, who are young affluent singles and sharers enjoying city life. The size of the bubble indicates the likelihood of the group being comprised of professionals; the highest groups being Fashionably Wired with an index of 175 and Leading Lifestyles with 171.

Sandra Hanchard

Sandra is Research Analyst, Hitwise Asia Pacific. This was first published on Hitwise analyst blog here.

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Flickr Photo By моe