Word reaches me that Facebook continues to rise in dominance here in the Antipodes, principally because, as Giovanni Rodriguez says, “it works“.
Steven Noble, of Hill & Knowlton fame, pointed me to a couple of Hitwise charts that are deceptive in their simplicity. It’s true — graphs and charts can tell you what you want them to say.
For example, chart 1 below shows the Singaporian rise and rise of Facebook (or ‘Crackbook’ as the very funny Steve Sharam calls it).
Chart 2 shows the rise and rise in New Zealand:
All well and good.
But the salutary ‘kick in the pants’ and reminder of how BIG the competition for Crackbook is here in Australia comes from Sandra Hancahrd from Hitwise:
“I’m not sure I can confirm that FaceBook has reached a tipping point in Australia yet; but I can say both anecdotally (having joined recently and witnessed its very quick viral effect!) and through our Hitwise data, it’s growing and likely to gain further ground.
“To give you a quick run down:
FaceBook ranked 3rd in the Hitwise Social Networking Custom category, with 3.96% market share; behind MySpace (68.84%) and Bebo (13.05%) during the month of May 2007.
Facebook while still ranked third, week ending 16 June 2007, now accounts for 6.36% market share of visits. Compared to the previous week, Facebook jumped by 10%!”
Now, a jump from 4% to 6% is good, but against MySpace’s 69%? All Rupert has to do is introduce a few whizz-bang widgets into MySpace and the trend could be reversed.
Still, to my mind, Facebook is providing me with tons of valuable content in our industry and the opportunity to catch up with long-lost friends in Blighty.
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