Facebook Domination

I’ve reconnected with friends I haven’t talked with in twenty years. I can chat with my grandpa-in-law in Israel or Paris from Phoenix. I get to watch my cousin’s twins grow up. I’m immersed in my six siblings’ lives from another state. My best friend from high school who I haven’t talked to for nearly ten years is now on speed dial. My great aunt Clareen uploads images of her newest artwork for her 59 fans (and growing) to see. Former co-workers that grew to be best friends continue to stay in my life even though they live in New York, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, Colorado and New Zealand. All thanks to Facebook.

Facebook’s subscriber base was the size of Japan’s population in January. Since then, Facebook says it has doubled its subscribers between February and April of 2009. From a business perspective, that growing audience means traffic to any website that gets a link on Facebook.

How much traffic? According to Copyblogger.com, the analysts at Hitwise claim that celebrity gossip blogger Perez Hilton now gets more traffic from Facebook than from Google – more than 7 million pageviews from Facebook alone. If that trend increases, then the current wisdom about Search Engine Optimization (SEO)/web traffic is about to get turned on its ear.