Crunching the numbers to make sense of Social Media (think Twitter and Facebook)
According to Neilsen Online, Australians are spending a staggering 37.5 hours per month on average in front of our PC’s, we also use the web 39 times and visit 65 different domains.
While the Connecting Images team no doubt skew these figures (after all we live online) we were intrigued by what everyone else is up to and how their behaviour is relevant to our clients.
Twitter vs Facebook vs Blogs vs Email vs Google (and other search engines)
Thanks to recent hype and celebrity usage Twitter is now well and truly part of our pop-culture. As the new kid on the social media block, estimates put user numbers at approximately 700,000 (or roughly 6% of the total active online population).
This user volume (predominantly early adopters with an interest in tech) has real potential to drive traffic. User web savvy content creators who wield influence in their networks and will comment on (both positive and negative) and link to content they find online. The technographics of the Twitterverse indicate 5% of users account for 75% of all activity. ie There’s a small group of heavy users driving the trend. These super influencers are self-confessed Social Media Geeks, many Twittering about the topics of online marketing. Source.
Twitter’s recent growth, combined with the 3.9 million Australian Facebook users (approx. a 40/60 male to female split) indicates a real shift in web users’ behaviour, from predominantly information consumption to active networking with social and business applications.
While growth rates of new blogs and web based email accounts remain relatively static, visits to Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Blogger and Wordpress are still higher than Facebook and Twitter combined. Google is still number one for traffic generation with over 10% of total visits to all sites in the first week of July out-performing Facebook by nearly 250%. Source Hitwise.
Some other key insights for Australia:
- The average viewing time on a web page is about 53 seconds
- Google averages about 10 million visits per month
- It has a 90% share of the local search market
- Of the 12 million active web users nearly all had an email address
- 46% of web users over 50 consume social media (blogs, video, photo sharing)
Here’s our take on what this means for you:
- Make sure your website is well optimised to be found in Google
- Create great content that users want to consume
- Offer them something free of charge in exchange for their email address
(you do have a database, don’t you?)
- Send a snappy e-newsletter to your “fans” containing short snippets of articles, linking back to your website
- Use platforms like Facebook and Twitter to drive traffic back to your site
Our team is continuously creating traffic generation strategies for clients. To find out how you can get the most out of your website, give us a call today on (03) 9819 2566.