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Hitwise Intelligence - Sandra Hanchard - Asia Pacific
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Government sites receive more traffic from Social Nets than News and Media
September 21, 2009
During a recent presentation at the AMI Government Marketing and Communications Conference, I noted that Government websites received more traffic from Social Networking and Forums than the online News and Media industry for the first time during August 2009 in Australia. While this is partly the result of the rapid growth in visits to Social Networking websites overall, I believe this reflects a much wider engagement by Government agencies in the Social Networking space in the past couple of years. Indeed, there were many local examples of Government initiatives on Facebook and Twitter at the conference, ranging from the Country Fire Authority to the Victorian Police.
Social Nets increasingly becoming an ‘authority’ traffic source
This brought my attention to wider changes we’re seeing in online traffic distribution – with many ‘traditional’ categories, such as Banks & Financial Institutions, Shopping and Travel much more reliant on Social Networking traffic than they were two years ago. Banking websites in particular received an increase of 110.5% in traffic referrals from Social Nets, comparing August 2007 and August 2009. In contrast, content-driven industries such as Entertainment have always been heavily reliant on Social Networking traffic, with referrals outstripping News and Media traffic from before September 2006.
The increase in referrals from Social Networking websites has been largely at the expense of other traffic drivers, including Email Services, Portals and News and Media websites. The implication here is that Social Networks will increasingly become the preferred online channel for organisations to distribute their PR; and in particular, traditional News and Media websites face an uphill battle with Social Networks in providing the most immediate, if not relevant, third-party source of information on organisations.
One last important aside, visits to Social Networking websites are fast catching up to Search Engines, accounting for 11.38% and 12.55% share of visits respectively in August 2009 (Hat tip to our Senior Account Manager, Kimberleigh Stowe for pointing this out). Watch for the announcement on when visits to Social Nets overtake Search Engines in Australia :)
Posted by Sandra Hanchard at 11:58 AM
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In Categories Government | Social Networking
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Comments
Thanks for your comments Wenger, interesting to hear your perspective from Malaysia.
Posted by Sandra Hanchard | September 25, 2009 11:39 AM
Hi,
an increasing number of browsers allow people to surf multiple sites at once (tabbed browsing) ie surfing Facebook while looking for a government service.
With the way Hitwise measures traffic - is it possible that some percentage of that increase in traffic from Social Media (to government) is a result of this rather....than direct clickstream?
Thanks
Aron
Posted by Aron Hausler | September 29, 2009 06:46 PM
Hi Aron,
There doesn't have to be a direct url link for traffic between sites to be counted in clickstream - so tabbed browsing could be included. This helps us to provide insights on users' concurrent online activity.
Cheers
Sandra
Posted by Sandra Hanchard | September 29, 2009 07:01 PM
I was just lamenting the fact that most mainstream media don't include links to their primary sources, instead they mostly post a truncated piece on the issue - sometimes with analysis or spin. If they are to survive mainstream media need to add more value by at least adding links to sources so that the reader can pursue items of interest. As it is I often use search engines to locate these primary sources - often government web sites.
Posted by Peter McFarlane | October 9, 2009 07:45 PM
Good point on providing more value by adding links to primary sources. There's also the balance of wanting to retain users on the core media site, but I'm sure better online sourcing would only enhance the perception of quality/integrity of the news site.
Posted by Sandra Hanchard | October 12, 2009 11:17 AM
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Hi Sandra,
I do enjoy your analysis and what you wrote deserves a second thought. The biggest difference between news and media portals as opposed to social networking sites is the information content of the latter is spurious, more emotive and as you mentioned perhaps the first chance an individual may get to discuss perhaps an item of interest.
Out of curiosity, suppose that we were to trend the amount of human talktime vs. the amount of conversations (i.e. messages going back and forth in a social networking website). Would you expect that the audible word has now been replaced by the rendered character as the primary form of human communication?
Jargon aside, isn't this a significant evolution or devolution of human society? From speaking face to face, to via telephone to now via the keyboard.
I am from Malaysia, perhaps the only country in the world where articles splashed on social networking sites become the critical news driver for the entire nation.
In Malaysia, social networking is important because of the polarization between races, results in communication between two ethnic groups conducted via blogs and facebook as opposed to saying 'Hi how are you' on the street.
So, in each country the dynamic behind the growth of social networking seems to be different, but back to my question, is it a healthy trend that humans spend more time communicating by keyboard than by mouth?
Warm Regards
Wenger J Khairy
Posted by Wenger J Khairy | September 25, 2009 02:11 AM