Yet Another Reason Why Your Firm Needs a Facebook Page

Interesting post today from the blog, All Facebook, by Neil Vidyarthi:

A report from the Network Box shows that 6.8 percent of all the URLs accessed by businesses goes to Facebook and 10 percent of internet bandwidth goes to Youtube. The study analyzed 13 billion URLs accessed by businesses and studied business bandwidths to find results, and found Facebook and Youtube leading other companies like Google and Yahoo.

The report also found that Google attracted 3.4 percent of all URLs, followed by Yahoo!’s image server YIMG at 2.8 percent and Yahoo! itself with 2.4 percent. DoubleClick, the banner ad provider got 1.7 percent of all URL traffic, due to their massive banner network and its presence on a variety of pages. In the traffic category, Facebook used 4.5 percent of all bandwidth, Windows Update used 3.3 percent, Yimg used 2.7 percent and Google used 2.5 percent.

According to the SC Magazine UK, Simon Heron, internet security analyst for Network Box, said: “The figures show that IT managers are right to be concerned about the amount of social network use at work. There are two real concerns here: firstly that employees will be downloading applications from social networks and putting security at risk; and secondly the amount of corporate bandwidth that appears to be being used for non-corporate activity.”

This is a report that analyzed businesses strictly, and these results give creedence to the fact that a lot of businesses are clamping down on the use of social networks at the work place. 7 times out of 100, the site visited by an employee at an average business is Facebook. The study didn’t look at time spent, but Facebook is the site on the web with the highest time spent per user, and surely this means that users may be browsing and stalking during extended breaks during their work day. Maybe soon we’ll have lunch breaks and Facebook breaks as part of an employee’s workday. The alternative is to block the service completely but that likely angers employees.