New figures from Hitwise show that social networking behemoth Facebook is now the most searched-for brand in the UK and the second most visited website overall. Only Google itself had more UK web traffic in  the last  quarter.

YouTube was the second most searched-for brand, followed by Ebay, Bebo and the BBC.

According to the stats, one in every forty-two searches in the UK include the phrase “Facebook”. This nicely illustrates  a couple of trends that have been developing in the UK in recent years. Firstly, our unquenchable thirst for social networking sites (Brits devote more time to these sites than any other nationality). To put this in context, social networking sites received 13% more traffic than retailers during the measured period and over 27% more than adult sites.

This demonstrates the rapidly-changing way that people are interacting with the internet and how comfortable the British public are with online social transactions. Compare this with the stigma of having an internet-based “social life” even five years ago and the societal shift we are seeing is huge.

Secondly, these figures show the number of searchers who would rather type a brand into a search engine than type in the address bar or click on a bookmark.

This second fact is something that we have watched develop with our own clients’ sites. This is arguably bad news for the bigger brands as it allows smaller rivals to piggyback on their names through AdWords. This said, perhaps it’s time Google gave the smaller guys a break; Aaron Wall recently added a fantastic post on his SEOBook blog about Google’s recent tweaks in favour of household names – a trend that we have been tracking closely at Upstream.

Internet super-brands such as Google and, to a lesser extent, Facebook, are now among the most recognised in Britain. Unlike traditional brands, we actively interact with these online services on a daily basis. And the most important factor with all of these super brands? It is our information that makes Facebook work, it is our information that Google search results provide. Brand interaction just doesn’t get better than that.