Social media drives five times as much traffic to Australian government sites as online news media

A couple of years ago Hitwise, an internet measurement company that uses ISP logs to measure traffic to websites, reported that social media sites had become a larger source of traffic for Australian government websites than online news sites.

This was a seismic change in user behaviour. Suddenly people were more likely to reach a goverment site in Australia from Facebook, Twitter or another social media site than from news.com.au, smh.com.au, abc.net.au or another traditional news source.

Of course it may have also been a simple one month hiccup.

Therefore last week I asked Hitwise to provide a ‘two years on’ view at their blog to see if there was a trend.

And there was!

Social media referrals to government sites in Australia hadn’t only remained above news and media sites, they’d skyrocketed.

Source: Hitwise Experian

As Tim Lovitt posted in Hitwise’s blog, in a rather understated manner, Social Media important to Government, between December 2008 and December 2011 social media had doubled it’s share while news and media had barely held it’s own.

In fact, by December 2011 social media was sending 9.75% of the traffic to government sites while news and media sites were only sending 2.27% of the traffic.

So should agencies invest in producing more media releases or in developing their social media presence?

I know which I would choose.