Just a few years ago, the only people who used Facebook (News - Alert) were college students who had a campus email address. That has certainly changed over the last decade while Facebook has gotten bigger and bigger. A few months ago, a study was released that shows that a huge majority of adults are now using the social networking service. Facebook has actually gotten so big that a brand new study in England shows that a full one third of workers use Facebook when they are at the office.

Facebook has become so popular because of the number of different things that are done with social networking sites. Of course, sometimes-social networking sites are nothing more than time wasters when employees begin to become overwhelmed with the pressures of the day. Nowadays, Facebook users can do things like planning a giant party, or buy products that are specifically geared towards that site’s audience.

This new British reports shows that almost half (45 percent) of respondents who admitted to using social networking at the office preferred Facebook. Closely following Facebook was LinkedIn (News - Alert), the social networking site that is geared more towards the professional connection. 

Many employers over the last few years have begun using LinkedIn especially as another way to vet their applicants. Still other employees were shown to prefer Twitter or the video social networking site YouTube (News - Alert). A smaller group surfed various blogs while they were at work.

Among the people who were most likely to be using Facebook or another social site during working hours, marketing and IT professionals used Facebook the most while engineers and accountants used it quite a bit more sparingly. 

Even among those who use social networking sites, two-thirds believe that their employers have the right to completely block sites like Facebook. Despite those findings, the report shows that only 30 percent of the companies that were included in the study totally block access to those types of sites.

That doesn’t mean that your office isn’t monitoring where you go and what you do while on the web. Some offices understand that the sites can be useful for work related endeavors as long as you aren’t spending a majority of your day on them.