Facebook is more popular than Google @ work

Business employees are visiting Facebook from the workplace more than any other internet site, including Google, Managed Security Services company Network Box discovered in a recent study.

The company looked at 13 billion URLs used by businesses in the first quarter of 2010 and found that 6.8% of all business Internet traffic goes to Facebook, which is double the amount of business traffic that goes to Google and nearly triple the amount that Yahoo gets.

Network Box also found that Facebook consumes a significant portion of business bandwidth: 4.5% of all bandwidth. However, YouTube reigns supreme in that department, accounting for 10% of all business bandwidth used. An accompanying survey showed that 43% respondents are concerned about this seemingly excessive use of social media in the workplace.

Facebook certainly appears to dominate business users’ attention while at work. If previous findings that Facebook is the fourth largest destination site for news are accurate, then perhaps we can safely assume that in-office use of Facebook is for more than just social networking. We can only hope that the YouTube video viewing is as educational in nature.

Business Traffic and Bandwidth
Top five websites visited by businesses:

1. Facebook – 6.8 per cent of all traffic
2. Google – 3.4 per cent of all traffic
3. Yimg (Yahoo!’s image server) – 2.8 per cent of all traffic
4. Yahoo – 2.4 per cent of all traffic
5. Doubleclick – 1.7 per cent of all traffic
Top five business bandwidth sites:

1. YouTube – 10 per cent of all bandwidth used
2. Facebook – 4.5 per cent of all bandwidth used
3. Windows Update – 3.3 per cent of all bandwidth used
4. Yimg (Yahoo!’s image server) – 2.7 per cent of all bandwidth used
5. Google – 2.5 per cent of all bandwidth used