NZ Search & Social Media Stats

For the last eight years my work focus has been the US online market. Whether I was living in Melbourne, Auckland or Wanaka, the work ended up in an email inbox somewhere in the US.

Now, establishing my own consulting business and working with local clients, my work focus has shifted to spend more time studying local web usage. It’s interesting to be spending a little more time looking at my local web neighbourhood. The Web may be global but its usage varies across time zones and country borders.

Google Dominates NZ Search with  89% Market Share

And there’s definitely a “900 pound gorilla” in the New Zealand search space: combining Google.co.nz and .com shares gives  the non-resident gorilla 89.19% of NZ searches, with MSN’s Live beating Yahoo!  for the search scraps with 4.30% versus 2.23% (source: Hitwise, Search Volume 24 Weeks ending May 31, 2008).

Google can’t boast that kind of dominance in the US where its share is more like 58%.

NZ Social Network Picture is A little Different To US Picture

My latest Hitwise newsletter offers insight into New Zealanders’ use of social networks.  Seems Facebook and Bebo are almost equally popular with 39.87% & 39.15% of social network use and Myspace (still dominant in the US) lagging behind with 7.81%.

Big movers in the US market — photo sharing site, Flickr (101% growth from May ‘07 - May ‘08 to rank 3rd behind MySpace and Yahoo in unique visitors), people search network Reunion.com (77% growth for 5th spot), social bookmarking site Digg.com (90% growth for 11th) and business social networking site LinkedIn (138% growth for 20th) — don’t feature in NZ stats.

My impression [should really take a look] is that Bebo is definitely for a younger demographic — witnessed it causing sibling friction between an 11 year old boy and his 8 year old sister with one laptop to share recently, for instance.

So it seems like Facebook is the place to look if you’re a NZ business thinking about doing something about “this social media thing everyone is talking about.”