Last week, I wrote a post on Corporate Eye about the increasing use of social networking among consumers in China. This week, I’ll take a look at social networking usage rates in Australia where research by comScore reports that 1 in every 5 minutes spent online in Australia is spent on social networking sites.
In fact, social networking is the top online activity among Australian Internet users based on time spent on various online activities as the following data shows us:
- Social networking: 21.9% of online time
- Portals: 19.7% of online time
- Instant messengers: 11.6% of online time
- Entertainment: 11.1% of online time
- Email: 5.9% of online time
- Games: 3.2% of online time
- News/information: 3.0% of online time
- Search/navigation: 2.8% of online time
- Auctions: 2.4% of online time
- Community: 2.1% of online time
Facebook was the top site in Australia based on the amount of time Internet users spent on the site, but Microsoft and Google took the top two spots, respectively, for the most visits (Facebook came in third for most visits).
Clearly, the popularity of social networks, particularly Facebook, is not isolated to one part of the world. Internet users around the world are spending a significant amount of time on social networking sites. It makes sense that your brand should be there, too. The days of thinking, “my customers aren’t online and don’t use sites like Facebook,” are over.
What do you think?
Image: stock.xchng
Lucy is Editor at Corporate Eye
