NEW YORK: Web users around the world are spending more time on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, meaning that a growing number of brands are also turning to these platforms.

New figures from The Nielsen Company, the research firm, showed that 142.1 million consumers in the US accessed properties like social networks and blogs in December last year.

This audience spent an average of more than six hours viewing material hosted on these services, a total that had increased by 143% year-on-year.

Some 46.6 million Japanese netizens also logged on to these portals in the closing month of 2009, typically devoting almost three hours to this kind of activity.

More than 31 million Brazilians used offerings such as Orkut in the same period, with a normal “dwell time” of over 4.5 hours, while 29.1 million Britons dedicated six hours to this pastime during the month.

Across the ten countries assessed – which also included Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Switzerland – the overall “time per person” recorded on social networks and blogs rose by 82% in all.

Out of a total sample of 307 million people, Facebook received 206.9 million visitors, with the amount of time that US members remained on its pages improving by 200% on an annual basis.

Twitter posted an uptick of 368% on this measure, and was the fastest-growing social network in the US, with 18.1 million people posting or reading “tweets” in the final month of last year, up from 2.7 million in December 2008.