Since social media is so ingrained into most users’ Internet experience, it’s easy to

forget that most social media platforms are still relatively new.

If they were children, most would still need to have their hands held when

they crossed the streets.

Yet there is no denying that social media WILL become the leading provider

of web content in 2012, according to an extensive report by ComScore. In December

social media accounted for 16.6 percent of all Internet minutes, and 9 out of 10 users

visited at least one social media site in a month.

Traditional web portals like Yahoo! and AOL, long the dominant landing pages

of the Internet, saw their popularity steadily decline throughout 2011.

They took up 16.7 percent of users’ Internet minutes, surely to be overtaken by Facebook

and Friends in the coming year.

Social media’s relevance to the entire online platform is one of the several

themes to emerge ComScore’s  findings on the state of digital technology.

It should come as no surprise that Facebook is leading the pack when it comes to reach,

and in fact it now reaches 3 out of every 4 Internet users. Amazingly it still continues

to attract new visitors, but where Mark Zuckeberg’s creation grew last year was not in

growth but in user engagement.

In December Facebook saw a 32% spike, with each user spending just over 7 hours on the site.

Your average consumer now spends about 15 percent of his or her time on Facebook.

ComScore says this makes Facebook the most engaging website overall, although all of

Google’s sites are still the most popular, with 187 million visitors in December.

Among the rest of the social media pack, Twitter has firmly entrenched itself as the

runner-up, with 37.5 million unique visitors in the US.  It had been running neck

and neck with LinkedIn throughout most of 2011, but the professional networking

site ended the year four million visitors behind.

MySpace, once the social media king, was the only site to buck the trend and saw its

audience shrink in 2011. It started the year with amount 50 million visitors, but dropped

each month and ended up 4th among social media sites with just under 24 mil.

Which leaves us with several upstarts, all which showed huge promise.  Google+, which had

90 million accounts as 2011 wrapped, reached 20.7 million visitors, followed by Tumlbr at 18.8.

But most startling of all was the success of Pinterest, which wasn’t even a blip on

ComScore’s radar screen six months ago. The site drew 8 million visitors based mostly on

good word-of-mouth.Pinterest bucked another trend among social media, garnering a mostly female audience.

It and Tumblr were the only sites other than Facebook to garner at least an hour of visitor engagement.

Pinterest’s success also highlighted the emergence of the “interest graph” and ComScore

believes that social networking based on shared interests, rather than personal connections,

will become one of the headlines of 2012.