CorpComms Magazine

Employees are now three times more active on social networking sites, such as Facebook and games, during working hours than they were a year ago, a new survey has revealed.

The eighth annual Palo Alto Application Usage and Risk Report, which surveyed the network traffic of more than 1,600 companies last year, found that social network posts by workers doubled last year.

The report detected a shift in the way employees use social networking during office hours, from a 'passive' or 'voyeuristic' approach, where they just check out pictures and read updates, to an 'active' approach, which involves playing games and commenting. The passive style accounted for 79 per cent of all social media consumption in 2009, but this fell to 39 per cent last year. Theuse of Facebook applications rose 250 per cent last year while the use of Facebook social plugins has almost doubled.

Twitter usage during working hours increased seven fold last year as a percentage of the social networking bandwidth but British workers were the least active. However, the survey found that the number of Twitter posts were flat over the year. It attributes the discrepancy to a rise in the number of attachments within tweets and the growing power of Twitter to deliver 'messages to the masses rapidly, effectively and repeatedly'.

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