I was having an interesting discussion with an associate the other day and started doing some research. We were wondering what percentage of people type in “facebook” to their browser search / toolbar instead of just typing facebook.com into their address bar.
We guessed that certainly some people would do this, as after all it does save you the tedious effort of typing those extra 4 characters, “.com”. But, you still have to hit “enter” and make that extra click once the search results arrive if you go the lazy route.
I did some homework. The term “facebook” was searched 2 billion times last month on Google globally. Assuming a 65% market share, this means that the term was search about 3 billion times last month world-wide.
OK, so we know how many use a search engine or browser toolbar to find Facebook, but what percentage do these searches represent of the total amount of sessions? A NielsanWire article reported Facebook’s audience as 400 million people in February; no doubt it’s grown since then.
The same study showed an average of 19 sessions per month for Facebook users. So if there are 400 million people visiting Facebook 19 times a month, that’s roughly 7.6 billion Facebook sessions per month in the US – that’s a lot.
Even still, our numbers tell us that close to 40% of those sessions originate from people who are too lazy to type in “.com” and instead prefer to use either a search engine or their browser toolbar search. Perhaps many sessions start with a user on a search engine as their home page – but even still this calculation is notable.
Only Facebook knows how people are really finding them – or at least they know more than someone without their data, but this is a curious discussion topic as people get lazier and lazier online.
