Are The British Social Networking Obsessed?

How best to reach UK consumers? Consider that one in four adults regularly log on to social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. Now that's a kingdom interested in uniting.

According to a report from Ofcom (The independent regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industries), UK adults spend more time on social networking sites than any other European country, and spend an average of 5.3 hours each month on them, return to them an average of 23 times a month.

In response to this activity, marketers spend more money per person on internet advertising than any other country--reportedly twice as much as France, Germany and Italy combined.

Some more facts and figures from the Ofcom research, reported in Brand Republic:

Ofcom has also researched how internet audiences around the world are broken down by gender. Across all the countries studied the divide is 52% women to 48% men. In the UK, the split is 50-50, except in the 18-34 age group, where far more women are surfing the net.

Other findings revealed that Europeans watch less TV than the Americans and Japanese. In the UK, the average is 25.2 hours a week, or 3.5 hours a day. That is less than Italy and Spain but more than Germany and Ireland.

People in the UK also listen to more radio than in any of the other eleven countries surveyed, while the medium is least popular in Japan.