powering Australia's discovery of the third place

According to an article in today’s Sydney Morning Herald, Australia now leads the world for time spent on social media sites:

“It’s just phenomenal,” said Nielsen Online’s director of analytics, Mark Higginson. “Every time I run those numbers I have to double check. Australians are spending nearly a third of all their time browsing the internet on Facebook alone.”

In October, Australian users spent 27.2 hours browsing online and 7.55 hours of the total was sucked up by Facebook. MySpace managed just 39 minutes and Twitter 17 minutes.

And in local figures released for the first time to the Herald yesterday, Facebook said its Australian users in October had uploaded 80 million pictures and written 32 million “wall posts” and 45 million “status updates”.

“Status updates are the invention of the decade,” Mr Higginson said.

If more Facebook hype is needed, Nielsen has also crunched global data which shows Australia now leads the world for time spent each month on social media sites (7.12 hours), ahead of Britain, Italy, North America and Japan.

“Traditionally Australia looks to the rest of the world in terms of who leads the internet and how stuff develops but in social media, we are leading everyone else in the amount of time we are spending there,” Mr Higginson said.”

Read the full article here.

posted by Venessa in the category Reserach & Statistics Social Media
Tags: australia, facebook, nielsen, social networks