NZers spend full working day a month on Facebook

Facebook fiends spend almost a full working day a month on the social network, says Nielsen (only a day?)

The research company has ranked New Zealanders' most popular social media sites (see chart below; click to enlarge).

All seems in order, bar a couple of curiosities.

LinkedIn is given a unique audience of 309,000 despite claiming 500,000 users earlier this year.

Maybe that means not everybody uses LinkedIn as obsessively as me.

Or maybe it reflects that Nielsen's new Online Ratings is based on a people panel which wouldn't help ratings for a business networking site [UPDATE: Nielsen says: The Nielsen Online Ratings methodology to get a unique audience number for each website is to combine home panel data with tagged data from Market Intelligence [based on traffic data collected about all users to a website via cookies].  The hybridisation process using tagged data gives us the “at work and any out of home activity” data to accurately provide us with a total market overview"].

And ah, Google+ .. my anecdotal impression is that many belong, but few use it. I wonder how many respondents are simply confused, or stumble blindly onto the Plus links Google now sprinkles throughout its services.

I do have to give it to Google+ that it's one of the quickest and easiest way to share a big album of photos with its no-fuss, throw-them-all-on-one-page approach (and I can't remeber the last time I updated my site on Google's Blogger - though apparently masses still are).

Speaking of photos, where's Instagram? A recent US survey said the social photo site (now owned by Facebook) accounts for more of people's time than Twitter. [UPDATE: Nielsen says Instagram had 164,000 unique NZ visitors in October or 5% reach. Time per person was 3 minutes 23 seconds per month - or about what I spend on it per day as what I would call a moderate user.)

Nielsen says 27% access a social network from a smartphone, and 7% from a tablet - lower numbers that I would have thought given booming NZ tablet and smartphone sales, and Vodafone's claim that Facebook accounts for fully half of its customers' total mobile data use.

Click chart to zoom.

If you're worried you're not using social media enough, click on the button below:

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