Wake up, check Facebook: Americans increasingly obsessed

Americans are increasingly obsessed with Facebook and many young women check their page even before using the bathroom in the morning, according to a poll released on Wednesday.

Thirty-four percent of the women aged 18 to 34 surveyed by Lightspeed Research for Oxygen Media said checking Facebook was the first thing they did in the morning, even before washing their face or brushing their teeth.

Twenty-percent admitted they sneak a peek at Facebook during the night while 26 percent said they get up in the middle of the night to read text messages.

Thirty-nine percent of the 1,605 social media users aged 18 to 54 surveyed for Oxygen Media, a service of entertainment giant NBC Universal, in May and June described themselves as "Facebook addicts."

Fifty-seven percent of the women aged 18 to 34 said they talk to people online more than face-to-face and 31 percent said they feel more confident about their online persona than their real life one.

Sixty-three percent of the young women said they use Facebook as a career networking tool, but 42 percent said they did not think there was anything wrong with posting photos of themselves visibly intoxicated.

Forty-eight percent of the young women said they find out about news through Facebook while 41 percent said they use Twitter to keep up to date.

Fifty percent of single women aged 18 to 34 said it's okay to meet and date other singles they meet through Facebook compared with 65 percent of single men.

Six percent of the young single women use it as a way to "hook up" as opposed to 20 percent of men.

Men aged 18 to 34 are also more likely than female counterparts to break up using Facebook -- 24 percent for men compared with nine percent for women, the survey found.

InsideFacebook.com, a site dedicated to the social network, said meanwhile that Facebook's growth slowed in the United States in June as it picked up only 320,800 new monthly active users last month compared with 7.8 million in May.

Inside Facebook said the slowdown in growth could "simply be a blip."

"But in the years we've been tracking the demographic data, we've rarely seen a dip like this, so we would tend to favor the idea of a root cause," it said.

"One possibility is that we're finally seeing the backlash from heavy media attention to Facebook privacy issues -- some of which were real, some the result of confusion and sensationalism," it added.