Expepctedly, Facebook is by far the No.1 social networking platform and had 206.9 million unique visitors in December 2009 – this is 67% of all social media users in the world (jesus…). Time spent on site is also impressive – the average time of a user is almost 6 hours a month… maybe mostly spent in farming and in viewing your friends’ photos.

On average time spent, social networks and blogs are the most visited online platforms. Right behind them are online games and instant messaging.

In the United States Twitter remains the fastest growing social network in terms of unique visitors – with 579% year-over-year increase, by 2.7 million uniques in December 2008 to 18.1 million in December 2009. Month-over-month, however, unique visitors deflated with 5%.

The United States continue to be the leader in terms of social networks and blogs usage, charting a 142.1 million unique visitors with an average time spent of 6 hours per month. The States are followed by Japan, whose unique visitors total 46.6 million for December with an average time spent of nearly 3 hours per month.

While the UK, Italy and Australia are with smaller user numbers (which is normal, because the US have much more citizens in comparison) all of them chart an average time spent between 6 and 7 hours.

What do these results mean?

From this year on, we will see more earnest efforts by marketers to penetrate Facebook and Twitter. If you can not be strategic, however, or if these websites do not fit into your existing marketing strategy – better don’t even try.

There is something else, too, that many people these days fail to notice – businesses offering development of corporate/personal/etc websites are about to face “extinction”. It is much easier, profitable and cost-effective to just go and create a profile on an already existing platform where your audience already is. Consider Basecent, Etsy, Linkedin, Shustir…

And here is the visual data: