According to statistics from web analytics firm Experian Hitwise, sites like Facebook surpass entertainment outlets that include porn websites in British Internet usage charts.
The Experian study — Carpe diem - Seizing the Moment in Social Media — revealed that social networking sites received more than 2.4 billion hits from U.K. users accounting for 12.46 percent, or almost one eighth of all U.K. web visits.
Brits also spend more time on each visit to a social network logging in an average of 22 minutes in January with Facebook attracting 56 percent of the traffic.
"While social networks of course compete amongst themselves for users, many of those users have a presence on multiple networks," said Robin Goad, Experian Hitwise's research director.
He added, "One in every eight people leaving a social network visits another one immediately after, something that is encouraged by the connections that exist between the networks. Facebook, for example, is a key source of traffic for many smaller social networks; while almost a fifth of people leaving Twitter go on to visit another social network."
But despite the social media frenzy, the report said that e-commerce isn’t benefiting from site referrals as much as they could.
Social-networking sites sent just 16 percent of their traffic to sites selling goods in January 2011, compared with the 33 percent sent from search engines.
