I am attending the Digital Marketing and Media Summit in Melbourne today and just attended a great session from Mark Higginson, Director of Analytics at Nielsen Online.
Mark shared some interesting new research from Nielsen Online today about Facebook and social media usage here in Australia:
- 8 hours/month: Australians spend on average 8 hours/month on Facebook
- Australia Leads: Australians spend more time on average per month using social media (any social media site, not just Facebook) than any other country (7:12 hours/month per Australian on average)
- 8 million Aussies: the current number of facebook.com users is 8 million Australians/month
- 13.7 million overall: there are 13.7 million active monthly Internet users in Australia
I think these statistics are remarkable because they show that Australians are doing more than checking out sites like Facebook and Twitter, setting up an account, and then abandoning the sites after a short amount of time. That’s a common refrain of non-believers out there. We Australians are, as Mark correctly observed, addicted.
Here are some resources for anyone interested in learning more about the landscape of Facebook + social media here in Australia:
- Facebook for Business: presentation created by myself and Thomas Crampton on business strategies for Facebook. This was tailored to Asia Pacific and delivered as part of our partnership with the Wall Street Journal Asia.
- Australian Social Networking Jumps: link to a Digital Media news story about how Australian social networking jumped by 29% – from Comscore, Ausgust 2009.
- History of the Australian Social Web: much-Dugg interactive timeline of the Australian social media and digital evolution
- DMMS09 Twitter Stream: feed of Tweets from the 2009 Digital Media & Marketing Summit
- Asia Digital Map Australia + Social Media Posts: all of the Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence posts on Australia
