powering Australia's discovery of the third place

The Sydney Morning Herald reported yesterday that Hitwise research director Alan Long had released data showing that in Australia social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and YouTube are “neck and neck” with search engines Google and Yahoo in terms of traffic:

“In the last week of December Hitwise recorded an increase of hits on social networking sites over search engines ‘but it was very short-lived’, Mr Long said.

‘This month we should see the social networking sites again taking over and for a much longer period than we saw in December.’”

Separately, Nielsen recently published data showing that whilst the US has the largest number of “social media and blog users”, Australians spend the most amount of time on social networks (nearly 7 hours per month):

Average time spent (h:m:s) per person on social media sites in December 2009:

1. Australia 6:52:28
2. United States 6:09:13
3. United Kingdom 6:07:54
4. Italy 6:00:07
5. Spain 5:30:55
6. Brazil 4:33:10
7. Germany 4:11:45
8. France 4:04:39
9. Switzerland 3:54:34
10. Japan 2:50:21

If you’re an Australian company this presents a fabulous opportunity. Social networks are much like ‘real world’ word of mouth networks – when we find something that we’re passionate about, we spread the word like wildfire amongst our friends, family and colleagues. Social technology makes this process more efficient, more viral and more global. Messages can very quickly be amplified on a worldwide scale, and layered with rich, authentic comment and reaction – so much so, that the message is almost impossible to avoid. Wouldn’t it be great if that was your message?

posted by Venessa in the category Media Social Media Social networking
Tags: australia, facebook, Google, Hitwise, myspace, nielsen, Social Media, Sydney Morning Herald, twitter, YouTube