An annual report from comScore on what happens online has shown that 1 in every 5 minutes of time online this year was spent on social networking sites – as compared to the 6% of internet time that went to social networking in 2007. By all accounts that sort of growth is expected to continue, and speed up, in 2012.

Of the 1,2 billion folks using the internet around the planet, 82% make use of social networks, albiet to varying degrees; Latin America devotes 28% of it’s time to social networking, where Asia only spends around 11% of its online time on social networks.

Obviously Facebook is winning at this game at present, reaching 55% of the world’s online population, and overtaking a couple of old rivals – like Orkut in Brazil. Huge growth is seeing elsewhere too, though; Twitter has grown by 59% in the past year, reaching about 160 million users, and even LinkedIn saw a 55% growth, which came as something of a surprise.

A couple of other salient data points jump out – but do take a look at the full report here:

• While women lead men in social network engagement globally — by 30% per month in North America and Europe – the gap seems to be leveling slowly; usage is more or less equal between genders at younger age groups.
• Younger age groups are also seeing a decline in email usage.
• Even Google+ isn’t doing terribly, with 65 million users worldwide; I’d sort of expected it to have died by now.

comScore is a pretty reliable third-party measurement service for web traffic. Their data report has some pretty fun infographics, too.

[Source: comScore]