Further to my post about onsite and offsite consumer engagement is the following graph by Hitwise showing the rise and rise  of social networks in Australia

Key Takeway: If you are spending time and energy on SEO for your main website that is important but it is also important to create and maintain a visible and well thought out engagement strategy for social networks

According to an article in  www.Gigaom.com :

• U.S. web users tripled the amount of time they spent on social networks in August from the same month last year, according to Nielsen.
• Estimated online advertising spending on social networks more than doubled over the same period.
• Around 17 percent of all time spent on the web in August in the U.S. was on social networks, up from 6 percent during the same period a year ago, suggesting that sites like Twitter and Facebook have not only grown their audience size, but augmented user engagement.
• Meanwhile, advertising on social networks rose to $108 million last month from $49 million in August of 2008, an increase of 119 percent.

Recent Findings from the Oneupweb study on eyetracking on social networks shows the dominance of sponsored ads:

• 65% of participants engaged with sponsored ads within social networks within the first 10 seconds of their search
• Scan paths do not follow the order of the search. Sponsored ads were looked at before the third or fourth organic results
• There is not a significant difference in fixation duration between Facebook and YouTube

Image below shows eye-track of Facebook indicating the dominance of top results and right hand sponsored ad.

You can download the full report EyeTracking and Social Network report free of charge.