Social networking black hole Facebook is responsible for half of all mobile web traffic in the UK. With membership having just gone past the 400m mark, Facebook – which has just celebrated its sixth birthday – is showing no signs of losing its appeal. Read on for more…

Facebook’s growth shows no sign of slowing down and, according to the GSM Association (GSMA), is being spurred on by the mobile market. The GSMA data for December has only come in for three of the five UK networks, but had Facebook accounting for nearly six times as many mobile minutes as the next most popular web destination, Google’s umbrella of websites.

In terms of actual time, UK mobile surfers spent 2.2bn minutes on Facebook over December, and that’s just for three networks, don’t forget. Facebook also had five million unique visitors, representing more than 30 per cent of the UK’s 16 million mobile internet users over the three networks. Following on from Facebook and Google, which saw 395m minutes of action, Microsoft sites were next most popular, with 165m.

Vodafone was the seventh most popular web destination for mobile users, with 89 million minutes in total.