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We all know social media is on the rise, but just how much did it grow in Australia during 2009? comScore found that it jumped 29 per cent from 2008-2009. An enormous growth, and is a real indicator to marketers and advertisers out there to jump on board if they don’t want to miss out on a huge market.

Social networking users are also a great market to target because they make up 90 percent of the audience base for the top Internet properties in Australia. So apart from just being present on social networking sites, these users are everywhere on the Internet.

As you’d expect Facebook’s growth did not stop, and the biggest percentage growth was from Twitter.

Anyone in social media would expect both these things, and if the stats showed anything different, some serious questions would be asked.

To put it simply for you, here’s a table of the basic statistics of total unique visitors for the top 10 social media sites in Australia.

As you can see Twitter had enormous growth with a percentage change from 2008 to 2009 of 6,122!

Granted, Twitter was only a fairly small, insignificant player in the social media networking platforms in 2008 in Australia – but now it clearly has presence. I believe Twitter will continue to grow in Australia in 2010 as more and more people become familiar with it, and realise it’s a great tool for business, networking and keeping up-to-date with everything that you’re interested in.

3 out of 4 Australians Visited a Social Networking Site in June/2009.

Anybody who’s studied statistics (or just has a good knowledge about stats) knows that a ratio of 3 in 4 is not a bad ratio – especially when the total sample is the entire population of Australia who are aged over 15 (so they’re old enough to use the Internet).

And 3 in 4 is the proportion of Australians who visited a social networking site in June 2009, with nearly 9 million people.

That makes it one of the most popular content categories on the Internet.

Of course Facebook got the most visits with over 6 million in June alone, giving it the 95% growth it achieved from the previous year.

What surprises me though, is the social networking site that received the second highest visits was Myspace with 3.5 million visitors.

What isn’t surprising to any of us though, is Google receiving the most visited in Australia with 10.7 million visitors in June alone. B

ut what’s important to note is that included in those 10.7 million, 78 percent were also visitors to social networking sites, and 16 percent of those were heavy social networkers.

Aside from just using social networking sites, social media users are all over the Internet.

Which is not at all surprising, considering social networking platforms provide the most interactive and engaging form of communication on the web. So of course they’re going to venture out to other sites and not remain constricted to only their favourite website.

As the stats show, loud and clear, most people surfing the web are social networking users, and social networking sites are on the rise – rapidly.

For people wanting even more statistics and the full press release about comScore’s research on social media usage in Australia in June 2009 go to:
http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2009/8/2_Million_More_Australians_Go_Social_in_2009

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