According to the latest data from Compete, the ’25 Random Things About Me’ meme has not only given us access to a plethora of random facts about people we barely know, but this digital fad has also been good for Facebook. According to the latest data from Compete, four times more people than usual visited the ‘Notes’ section on Facebook in January. Compete estimates that close to 20 million users used ‘Notes’ in January, while only about 4 million used it in October 2008.
But it wasn’t just the ‘Notes’ section that profited from this meme. Facebook itself saw its traffic grow by 15% in January, which represents the fourth largest single month increase in visitors to the site. In addition, 60% more profiles were created in January than in December.
Just this month, Facebook finally surpassed MySpace as the top social networking site in the U.S., and judging from this data some of that surge can be attributed to the 25 Things meme.
It would probably be wrong to attribute all of Facebook’s growth to the ’25 Random Things’ meme, but the renewed interest in notes on Facebook is most likely fully attributable to this. Notes on Facebook are basically small blog posts, and represent the only space on the site where you can respond after being tagged to write 25 random things about yourself.
Given that the 25 Things meme has now reached both Time Magazine and the New York Times, we assume that this fad is slowly coming to an end, but even so, Facebook has clearly profited from it in the last two months.
