Buoyed By Facebook, Social Media Sites Hit All-Time Traffic Highs In May

While Facebook gets the lion’s share of attention, the overall adoption of social media is also lifting several sites to all-time traffic levels and there’s no sign that this will change anytime soon.

According to a new comScore report, LinkedIn, Twitter and Tumblr — in addition to Facebook — all hit new highs for U.S. audience size during May.

The details:

• LinkedIn.com: 33.4 million visitors, 58% growth in the past year
• Twitter.com: 27 million visitors, 13% growth in the past year
• Tumblr.com: 10.7 million visitors, 166% growth in the past year

Not shown on the chart above is Facebook, which hit an all-time high of 157.2 million visitors in May — up 3.2 million visitors from April. ComScore says Facebook is the fourth largest U.S. web property.

Also not shown is MySpace — still the number two social networking site with 34.9 million visitors in May, but that’s trending down. ComScore says the site’s “audience has declined by nearly 50% in the past year while average user engagement has dropped 85%.”

Social Media Usage Continues To Rise

The bigger picture is that social media as a whole continues to grow as part of Americans’ daily lives online. This comScore chart shows continued growth in how much of our online time involves social networking.

According to comScore’s numbers, social networking now represents about one of every six minutes spent online in the U.S.; in 2007, it was about one of every 12 minutes.