Mediaboss Marketing

Keynote Systems, the expert in Internet and mobile cloud monitoring, monitors the top 10 UK social networking sites on a monthly basis and analyses how these sites perform compared to their competitors. By Robert Castley.

The social networking sites performed well in October, with seven out of nine websites loading in under two seconds. Facebook took the title as the best performing website, with an impressive response time of 0.75 seconds, the only social media site to take below a second to load. At the other end of the spectrum, Bebo struggled in its performance as it has done in previous months, with a response time of 15.71 seconds in October.

In terms of availability the chances of the website loading correctly when visited Facebook stormed up the table this month, from ninth place in September to second in October, with a success rate of 99.63 percent. Flickr also improved this month and achieved a success rate of 99.95 percent. Those not doing so well included; You Tube UK, Bebo and Wayn with success rates dipping below 99 percent for all three. Wayn had a particularly low success rate in October of 85.86 percent, falling to ninth place. Overall however, the availability of the social networks was good, with six out of the nine websites having an above 99 percent chance of being available and loading correctly when visited.

Social media is all about fast interaction, and if sites arent responding or are taking too long to load, it wont take long for users to become frustrated. It is promising that these social media sites are improving over time in terms of availability and performance, but consistency is absolutely key to creating loyal visitors. Moreover, given the vocal nature of social networks, poor performance could ruin a reputation, which could make or break an online service.

About the author:

Robert Castley has been solutions consultant at Keynote for over two years. Prior to working at Keynote, Robert worked as a Professional Services Consultant at a document management company, Macro 4, where he worked on developing custom web interfaces.

Robert is passionate about web performance and optimisation and has over 10 years of web development experience. One of his proudest achievements is developing one of the worlds most popular Open Source Content Management Systems to the masses Mambo, which now lives on as Joomla!

Robert has a BTEC National Diploma in Computer Studies.

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Performance of social networking sites – Index from Keynote Systems for October 2012