Study shows Facebook has overtaken MSN in the UK

A report from Nielsen claims that Facebook has now exceeded Microsoft’s websites in terms of UK visitors.

Taking figures for the month of May, Facebook managed to accumulate 26.8 million unique visitors. That total beat out Microsoft’s sites – MSN, Bing and Windows Live – which were slightly behind on 26.2 million.

That now makes Facebook the second most popular site in the UK behind Google (on some 33.9 million), although the search engine’s figures haven’t gone up this year, whereas Facebook is steadily increasing.

This is at odds with recent estimations by Inside Facebook, which claimed that the number of users of the social networking site had dropped slightly in the UK (and more heavily in the US). Data from comScore also pointed away from this conclusion, and we certainly don’t believe Facebook has peaked yet.

The study also revealed that part of Facebook’s growth is an explosion in older users who are finally getting on board with the wonderful world of status updates and wall scrawling.

Whereas over the last two years UK Facebook membership has risen by 40% overall, the number of those joining who are over fifty was more than double that with an increase of 85%.

Twitter has also grown substantially in May, cresting 6 million visitors in the UK, a new record, up a third on the month before. That has a lot to do with the whole super-injunctions scandal, where Twitter was the source to find out who-had-been-doing-what-to-whom-when-they-shouldn’t.