Israelis spend more time per person on social media than people in any other country, yet the percentage of Israel’s population that uses the technology doesn’t rank in the top ten.

Meanwhile, the U.S. ranks first for having the largest percentage of the population using social media, yet the country doesn’t make the top ten for the amount of time spent per person using the technology.

Those gems of data appear in a comScore report somewhat misleadingly entitled “Top 10 Need-To-Knows About Social Media And Where It’s Headed.”

The actual list of 10 itself consists of things we’ve heard about already, but the charts that accompany each of these items present the most helpful information.

That said, we’ve got the list below for you, but you’ll want to pay more attention to the niftiest of the charts that we’ve surrounded this post with. And do let us know in the comments section what insights you glean from the comScore data.

For the second year in a row, Americans visited Facebook more than any other website.

And for the third year in a row, people in the U.S. keyed the word “Facebook” into search engines more than any other term.

That’s according to Experian Hitwise, which also found:

• Facebook accounted for 3.1 percent of all searches, a 46 percent increase from 2010.
• Four variations of the term “Facebook” were among the top 10 terms and accounted for 4.42 percent of searches overall, a 24 percent increase from 2010.
• Social networking–related terms dominated the results, accounting for 4.18 percent of the top 50 searches. This is an increase of 12 percent compared with 2010.
• Common search terms for Facebook — e.g., facebook and facebook.com — accounted for 3.48 percent of all searches in the U.S. among the top 50 terms, which represents a 33 percent increase compared with 2010.
• Facebook was the top-visited website for the second year in a row.
• Facebook accounted for 10.29 percent of all U.S. visits between January and November of 2011, a 15 percent increase from 2010.

Visits to the website and searches for the word “Facebook” represent two different fact sets. People who search for the word “Facebook” and variations thereof might be newer users of the site or folks who seek news stories mentioning Facebook.

Regardless, both sets of data show that Facebook’s popularity isn’t waning.

Simon Bradstock, general manager of Experian Hitwise, said in a prepared statement:

Navigational searches dominated the top search results as users typed in terms versus typing in the URL in the browser bar. Hitwise saw 11 percent growth of single-word searches in 2011 as terms like ‘face’ and ‘you’ made the top 50 searches.

Marketers need to be particularly brand-savvy when managing their search optimization campaigns because of this behavior, which is a result of predictive search functionality across major search engines. Other top 2011 searches reflect ongoing fascination with celebrities online, and many of the top fast-moving searches centered on natural disasters or notable personalities passing away.

Readers, what insights do you glean from Experian Hitwise’s statistics?

Facebook released a ranking of its most popular games for 2011,  and among other surprises, Playdom’s Gardens of Time topped the list.

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Los Angeles International Airport ranks as the most social out of the world’s airports, based on the number of check-ins to Facebook and other geolocation services.

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Jesus Daily leads our list of the most engaging Facebook pages, followed by motivational speaker Mario Teguh and a host of non-U.S. pages, including ones for soccer and religion.
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Advertisements on Facebook get much higher levels of engagement than the average website’s ads do.

That comes from a study by NeuroFocus, a Nielsen subsidiary that  also found that people also pay more attention to and have a higher than average memory retention of ads on seen on Facebook.

Apparently, Facebook ads have some gender differences in their effects: Men see them as resonating with themselves more than with women do.

Ads on Facebook elicit memory retention when viewed in the news feed because the rest of the content on the page provides context that promotes learning.

Apparently, all of these factors together make ads on Facebook more effective than those on television, according to NeuroFocus. Do you agree with that finding, readers?

Gauging campaign performance is about to get a lot more interesting.  In a game-changing strategic partnership, comScore, the trusted digital measurement go-to is embarking on a strategic partnership with Buddy Media, Inc., the social software giant.

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Zynga shows no signs of slowing down, and the developer’s newest hit kicks off December on top of the countdown. The real story though, is the advancement of the social news applications that continue to gain steam after noteworthy finishes last Wednesday.
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What do Osama Bin Laden, Megan Fox, Harry Potter, House, Rihanna, Leo Messi, FC Barcelona, and CNN have in common? They all sit atop lists revealed by Facebook in its 2011 Memology analysis of status updates.

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Students’ grades drop by about .12 points for every 93 minutes above the 106-minute average time spent per day on Facebook, according to the latest study on the topic.

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